UNC Hip Hop ensemble delivers a night of entertainment elevating student artists

“Hip-hop is grounded in four distinct principles,” Donovan Livingston, a teaching assistant professor at UNC, said as he invited the audience to repeat after him. “Peace, love, unity, fun.”

Livingston’s words opened the UNC Hip-Hop Ensemble’s spring 2025 showcase on April 16 at The PITCH. The live performance, a collaboration with UNC Cypher, featured four original group tracks written, composed and performed by students in the Hip-Hop Ensemble. 

The students named the showcase, “Evergreen,” a title that Suzi Analogue, director of the Hip-Hop Ensemble, said represents the program and how it has grown.

“In the context of the show, Evergreen is like a garden reality that we thought of together, of us all coming together, being collaborative, coexisting within our differences, healing and actually growing,” she said.

Analogue also said the name speaks to the large number of people in the program going through transitional periods, including the graduating seniors and herself, as this is Analogue’s final semester with the ensemble. However, even though the program is undergoing major changes, Evergreen is a testament to the everlasting presence of hip-hop at UNC. 

Naming the showcase is only one phase of creating it, Analogue said. The process begins with research. Each student presents a performance that resonated with them, and the class dissects it to see what made the performance noteworthy and to draw inspiration for their own performance. 

“Everyone contributes to every part, so there's no confusion once we get into the composition section, everyone's super comfortable with giving feedback and trusting each other, and then we just start to make music from scratch,” Analogue said.

Students create the tracks and performance elements in a process that pulls from their unique experiences and skills — rapping, singing, producing and guitar playing, for example. 

“So we start out the first week of the semester in the room, introducing each other and laying out a concept,” graduate student Donavan Moonie said. “And in the coming weeks we'll sit and we'll talk about each other's roles, what we do. Production, performance, promotion: Those are the three branches. And then we go from there. So we'll have a concept—”

A new track began pouring out of the speakers. 

“Wow. That's my beat right there,” Moonie said. 

Moonie began rapping almost a decade ago and currently releases music under the name Don Atlas. He’s participated in the Hip-Hop Ensemble and Cypher during his time at UNC, and said that his involvement with Hip-Hop at UNC has changed his mindset surrounding his artistry from one grounded in competition to one made through cooperation. 

“Both have, like I said, nurtured a collaborative spirit that has made my music so much better,” he said. “It's made me pay attention. It's made me be more aware, and it's also kind of pushed me in ways that I wasn't used to being pushed because I was just out there in Gastonia, North Carolina doing it by myself.”

Some students take that collaboration outside of the ensemble. Ayla Baker Kural, a UNC alumna who joined the ensemble in spring 2023, teamed up with juniors Jessie Cotton and Ellie Sellers to create a girl group named JAEDED, a combination of their names. 

JAEDED performed an original song as part of the showcase, titled “Sowing the Skies.” Baker Kural said that the group has found support through the ensemble, including senior K’Mani Leonerio, who served as the group’s in-house producer, she said.

“ We all have different skill sets,” Baker Kural said. “Ellie is a rapper who sings. I'm a vocalist who raps, and then Jesse says she's just a vocalist, but we've gotten her to rap a little bit too, and we all have our different tastes and we mesh together so well into a really cool, funky vibe.”

After a series of solo and group performances, the Hip-Hop Ensemble showcase concluded with about an hour of free-styling, courtesy of Cypher. As people talked, danced and enjoyed performances together, it seemed likely that hip-hop at UNC was here to stay. 

“Hopefully, what I’ve started here is something that can go on forever,” Analogue said. 

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