Letting their Voices Flow: Creating Enhanced Therapeutic Dialogue in BIPOC Adolescents through Hip Hop Therapy

BIPOC adolescents often struggle to access quality music therapy due to the stigma surrounding receiving counseling help as well as the cultural disconnect created by the overwhelming Whiteness of therapists. Hip Hop therapy (HHT) seeks to provide BIPOC adolescents music therapy by focusing therapy sessions on artistic mediums and themes more familiar to them. Building off of procedures established by broader music therapy, HHT is a set of practices that use the messages and artistic expressions permeating Hip Hop culture for a therapeutic effect. This paper examines how the four main subcategories of Hip Hop therapy: listening, performing, creating, and improvising, are used to form an enhanced therapeutic dialogue between therapist and client. This enhanced therapeutic dialogue allows open communication between client and therapist and thus increases the likelihood of successful therapy. Despite promising evidence in low-powered studies, HHT is not supported by a battery of high-quality empirical evidence. Moreover, HHT’s generalizability is threatened by the fact that HHT may prove to be difficult to implement for many therapists unfamiliar with Hip Hop culture. Nonetheless, as the problems HHT attempts to address have not yet been solved by wider music therapy, HHT should continue to be explored while more evidence is gathered. At the present, HHT remains an unproven yet innovative and culturally sensitive therapy with the potential to benefit people who traditionally struggle to access music therapy