Meet The Harvard Grad Whose Rap Album Thesis Earned Him A Degree With Honors

Obasi Shaw couldn't decide what to write for his English senior thesis at Harvard University, so he rapped it instead. Watch our video and then read to find out more here about this incredibly talented student!

Amy Sharpe
Created by Amy Sharpe
On May 28, 2017
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Shaw was profiled in the Harvard Gazette where he got to speak about Liminal Minds for himself. First he talked about his influences in rap and what inspired him to do the rap album instead of a traditional research paper. While Shaw grew up listening primarily to Christian artists in Alabama where he was homeschooled, he has recently grown to love artists like Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar, who often rap about the black experience and racial injustice in America. But Shaw was also influenced by his studies in Old English literature.

Some people don’t consider rap a high art form. But poetry and rap are very similar. Rhyming poems were very common in old English poetry.

Obasi Shaw

Harvard Gazette, May 16, 2017

His professor and thesis adviser, Josh Bell, also commented on the influence of Old English poetry on Shaw's work.

Obasi’s album is very interesting because it uses Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ as an intellectual overlay. [But Shaw] is telling stories in each song from different points of view, and it’s critical of American society and racial politics.

Josh Bell

Harvard Gazette, May 16, 2017

If you're wondering about the title, Shaw spoke to how those racial politics play into his decision to name the album Liminal Minds, a play on the well-known phrase "criminal minds," with the word liminal denoting here a state of existence that is between two states of being, neither one nor the other.

Black people in America are caught between freedom and slavery. They’re free, but the effects of slavery still exist in society and in people’s subconscious. Each song is an exploration of black liminality, that state between slavery and freedom.

Obasi Shaw

Harvard Gazette, May 16, 2017

If you'd like to listen to Liminal Minds, you can do so for free on Soundcloud. And you'll probably want to because in addition to being an incredibly smart thesis, it's also got some pretty great jams. If you fall completely in love with it and want more music from Shaw, though, we have some slightly bad news for you. He won't be putting out any new material for a while, since he's accepted a year-long internship in software design in Seattle. You can, however, watch a few performances of some other songs he's written on Youtube though at a Harvard Arts First event here:

"Prophet"

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"Talk To Me"

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"Understand"

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What do you think of this insanely talented student? Talk to us about it in the comments below, and share with your friends to see what they think!

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