A new club has entered Rowan’s atmosphere and it’s called the Hip-Hop Culture Club. Named after the famous Hip-Hop Culture class here at Rowan. Yashira Guzman along with a few other sophomores interested in music, especially Hip-hop, decided to come together and make a safe place for students to enjoy a common interest together.

The main goal of the club is to promote hip-hop on and off campus, whether it be music made by students involved with the club or students who haven’t heard of the club yet and want to get into it. They can start by simply going to meetings and the club, led by President Guzman, will use their platform to help get their members’ music out there along with listening and talking about famous artist’s music.

“Right now we have about four or five (artists), but we’re still building it up,” Guzman said. The club was just approved by Rowan’s administration a couple of weeks ago, which indicates that Guzman and the founding members still have some ways to go before the hip-hop culture club is fully up and running smoothly.

The recently developed club’s mission statement is to create a safe space for hip-hop fans to share their love of the genre. Their purpose is to educate students about the music, lifestyle, fashion, and politics of hip-hop and to create a strong community to celebrate hip-hop culture. The club strives to create a diverse & inclusive community where students can come together to appreciate and engage with hip-hop culture. President Guzman, as well as the members of the club, want to recognize the profound influence that hip-hop has had on African American and broader cultural histories.

Guzman is really open to having all corners of hip-hop artists join the club to really diversify what types of artists are in the club. “We have one of our artists that’s very lyrical like a boom-bap sound and his name is X the Artist,” Guzman said. “Another one is Sav Will and he does a mix of things like reggae and afrobeats sounds… J-Trip is another one. He does commercial rap.”

A lot of the members in the club are music industry majors, including Guzman, and really are looking to work in the music industry but specifically in the Hip-hop realm.

“This club is perfect for us just to network with different creators whether it’s rappers or people on the management side, like me, just trying to find networking opportunities not only for people in the music industry major, but people who may do photography, videography, writers… It’s a good opportunity to build a community and share one type of love,” Guzman said. 

Knowing what needs to be done to get the club up and running, Guzman has already almost filled all of her E-board positions.

“We have the president, the vice president, secretary, treasurer, senator, event coordinator, and production manager. We’re looking for an Artist Manager to manage the rap collective. The marketing and promotion manager will create all the flyers and an outline for how we will promote and market different events. And then a PR and social media manager, who’s going to be responding to the emails, messages, and posts to social media,” Guzman explained.

With this new club still in the ground-level stage of development, they haven’t had their first official meeting yet, which is scheduled to be on March 22nd. You can find the club on Instagram, Spotify, Discord, TikTok, and through email at https://beacons.ai/rowanhiphop.

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