Our Story

Four Four Beat Labs is a STEAM-inspired maker space and digital pedagogies incubator. Founded in 2012, we use The OutKast Imagination, culture, music, and new media technologies to teach, produce, and enhance the computational media, coding, and civic engagement capacities of diverse student communities. Our projects are standards-based. They are designed for use by secondary and post-secondary youth/youth influencers.

The mission is to expand the traditional perspectives of “the classroom” space. That is, how it looks, where it happens, the archival resources used, and the limitless possibilities when technological innovation meets pedagogical sensibility.  The projects we incubate are guided by design principles that utilize the storied meanings of cultural artifacts to buildout interactive installations across analog, digital, and augmented platforms.

HipHop2020 Innovation Archive

An archive of educational resources informed by the Hip Hop Archive for secondary and post-secondary humanities and computational media instruction.

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FourCast

FourCast is a podcast studio run out of Four Four Beat Labs. It is known for its student-produced podcast called “Hacking Hip Hop”, which cracks the codes of activism in culture, media, and music.

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Hip Hop Studies & The South

Curating resources and scholarship about Hip Hop Studies in the American South.

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Ayodeji AladesanmiPublic Policy Major, Georgia Tech

“LMC 3306, Exploring the Lyrics of Outkast to Engage Politics of Social Justice, was a class that allowed me to take an interest that I thought belonged solely outside of the classroom and bring to it the type of rigorous academic approach that true social scientists use everyday. Under HipHop2020's curriculum, we not only learned how to appreciate the artistic and musical creations of an entire generation - we also learned that the messages communicated within hip-hop are meant to be used as vehicles to better understand the world and to equip every student and listener with the true mindset of a 21st century innovator. ”

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Raianna BrownMechanical Engineering Student, Georgia Tech

“"Hip-hop based instruction is important to me as a citizen of the historic city of Atlanta because of the way it frames our experience through the lens of this young yet pervasive art form. It is crucial now more than ever that we use the principles of HipHop2020 and its pedagogy in the classroom and beyond to afford each other respect, equity, and the space to grow as individuals."”

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Jhazzmyn JoinerLMC Major, Georgia Tech

“I feel like taking the course opened my eyes to some of the deeper meanings in hip hop music as it relates to lyrics, symbolism, and even some of the creative ways that instrumentation, sampling, beats, etc. are used to drive and push a message as well. Music is a universal language, and I understood that the most by being in a class with mostly white peers and being able to connect and bond in this way.”