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Creative Production 271to hip-hop, though. In grade school she listened to salsa romantica and Latinartists such as Marc Anthony, music that was popular with girls in her homecountry of El Salvador. In middle school she listened to mainstream hip-hopand R&B such as *NSYNC and 98 Degrees. When she hit high school mostother students were into hip-hop, particularly artists such as Messy Marv andSan Quinn from the local Bay Area Hyphy 7 music scene. Hip-hop was themusic she related to because of its rough edge and its rejection of warm andfuzzy love music. Mistreat wrote often about her life and experience comingto San Francisco and figuring out how she could fit into the teenage scene injunior high and high school.There was plenty to write about: home life, school life, and friends. So whenshe came to the Rap Project she had a quite a bit of content about everydaymatters, which she prodigiously transformed into rap lyrics. Mistreat’s firstattempt at recording was masterful. It was hard to believe that she had neverrapped before nor had previous experience in a recording booth. It was clearthat she was a virtuoso and a rare talent. She had a rapid-fire style of rappingthat would twist the tongues of most mortals. More important, she had aunique voice that was readily distinguishable from the luminary rappers thatshe most tried to emulate. She sounded like no one else; she was authenticallyherself when she rapped. This was rare for most of the rappers who came outof the Rap Project, because as they began rapping they tried to emulate theirfavorite rappers in tone and style, although some did eventually develop theirown voices. Most others who began emulating Jay-Z or Lil Wayne, forexample, often continued this mimicry and never got to the next level.A major pedagogical component of the Rap Project introductory classes wasthe pairing up of students to work on songs together. Though collaborationwas a part of the structure of the class, the pairing up of students was a moreorganic process and not directly organized by the instructors. Mistreat quicklylinked up with Young Mic, another very eager rapper who wrote lyrics prolifically.Young Mic, a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican, grew up in the African-American San Francisco neighborhood of Lakeside. Young Mic would comeeach day two hours early with notebooks full of writing. Like Mistreat, hewrote extensively before finding rap as a mode of expression. Young Micbegan his personal narrative writing while in the county jail for burglary. Oneof the other inmates had suggested that he should rap to those stories hewrote. Young Mic said he was kind of surprised when the inmate told himthat, because he too had never rapped before, even though he had listenedto hip-hop since middle school.Both Mistreat and Young Mic were inseparable in open-studio time andduring classes. They were the most avid of all the students in the areas ofrapping and recording. Unlike other students in the class, both Mistreat andYoung Mic were determined to become rappers. During the ten-week class,