He didn’t think he’d see past 16. Now he’s saving lives with a beat.

“This story originally appeared on May 5 in the NYCity News Service, run by the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY . JC Hall was not supposed to make it. Growing up on Long Island, drowning in addiction, alcoholism, and major depression, Hall had plans “not to see 16.” He also resisted the one thing that might have helped. “I was very anti-therapy,” he said. “I just saw it as something for weak people, and I wasn’t going to ask for help.” But hip-hop kept him alive long enough to see 38. He found solace listening to artists like DMX, Tupac, Biggie, and Eminem talk about the kinds of pain he didn’t hear anywhere else. Hearing those artists confront desperation and survival so honestly gave him something to hold onto. Hall’s healing began when he started creating his own raps at age 15. “There was something about taking all of the madness swirling around in my head and finding a way to put it to a beat—writing raps in rhythm and laying that chaos out in front of me on a page,” he said. Decades later, Hall now runs a hip-hop therapy studio program at Mott Haven Community High School in the South Bronx. About 30 students participate each year, with eight to 12 students in the studio at a time. The moniker conjures up a vision of therapy with a playlist and a couch. But neither factor into the sessions. In Hall’s program, hip-hop and traditional therapy are fully intertwined. Students participate in group as well as individual counseling. Technical coaching on breath control for rapping doubles as training in nervous system regulation. Learning to breathe deeply from the diaphragm not only improves vocal performance but also helps calm the body, sharpen focus, and manage anger or panic. The craft of writing strong verses that are specific, sensory, and present in a scene, naturally cultivates mindfulness. Hall was taught the principles of using rap as therapy from his late mentor, Fordham University professor Edgar Tyson who coined the term “Hip Hop Therapy.” Tyson served as Hall’s advisor at the school’s graduate program in social work. Hall arrived at Mott Haven Community High School as an intern in 2013 during the school’s initial year. In addition to his casework, he ran an informal after-school group. Upon graduation and licensing later that year, he was hired full-time and given the funding to build a professional studio and develop the full clinical program. While other schools incorporate hip-hop into school programming and therapy, it is mostly piecemeal. Hall’s program is the first in New York City to fully integrate a purpose-built professional studio with a therapeutic practice. Hip Hop Therapy offers a cultural framework that many of his students already live inside. “Conventional therapy reflects this Western, Eurocentric, very culturally incompetent thing,” Hall said. “Hip Hop Therapy is a contemporary approach to mental health treatment,” he said, one that taps into hip-hop’s roots in the African diaspora. Hall said that doing this work in the South Bronx, “the birthplace of hip-hop,” represents a kind of poetic justice. Hall traces some of his struggles to spending his 13th summer in a body cast. The devastating accident resulted from an ill-timed leap from a tree into a swimming pool, where his body hit only half his mark. Hall recovered in the hospital after breaking his femur in half, and found relief in the soothing flow of a morphine drip and pain pills. That first taste of relief doubled as escape. It took him the next year to learn to walk again. Hall struggled with both internal and external demons. He leaned toward self-destructive behavior as a child, even before the accident, describing himself as a thrill seeker as far as he can recall. “I definitely showed tendencies towards these predispositions long before that, though, and there is certainly family history,” he said. “So both nature and nurture for sure.” He said people in recovery describe a sense of searching that predates substance use—“I always felt like I was trying to fill a void within, as far back as I can remember.” Hall’s teenage recovery process required medication, 12-step programs, psychiatric care, and a family with the resources to access all of it. “Hip-hop kept me afloat, right? But it alone was not enough,” Hall said. “It was really like a whole slew of things that, if even just one of them wasn’t there, I don’t see why I would be here today.” And he describes himself as still in recovery. “It’s a process as opposed to an endpoint; in recovery rather than recovered.” Mott Haven, a transfer high school, draws students who have already failed somewhere else or believe they have failed themselves. “In the community I’m in, it seems like there’s generally not much interest in these kids or what they have to offer,” said Hall. Kryst Jackson, 19, said that Mott Haven and Hall’s studio opened another world. “I got kicked out of my other school, you know, through the street stuff,” he said. “So I came here as, like, a second opportunity.” Even that felt fragile at first. “I ain’t gonna lie, I thought it was too good to be true, ’cause I never seen no school like that,” Jackson said. “JC, he helped me pursue that path. He just helped me get a voice for myself in terms of music.” Victor Ferreira, 18, arrived with a similar story. At his previous school, he said he skipped classes, failed every subject, and stopped showing up altogether for six months. He walked into Hall’s program in September 2024, expecting, in his own words, “a whole bunch of bullshit.” He found something different. Hall’s studio has a rule: no lyrics glorifying gang violence. Ferreira had assumed that was simply what rap was, and the constraint opened a door. “Now you’ve got people thinking about becoming more lyrical with their songs — the stuff that people are really thinking about, like, deeply — that’s what comes out into the songs now,” Ferreira said. Hall’s work is gaining attention for its innovation and success. In 2024, Hall won the David Prize , a $200,000 no-strings award for innovative solutions to New York City problems. In Mott Haven, where median household income hovers around $34,000, only 78% of students graduate from high school compared with a 99% graduation rate and roughly $157,000 median income on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Compared with their classmates, students in Hall’s program graduate at a significantly higher rate than students who don’t participate. Ferriera and Jackson made it across that stage last year. Hall’s philosophy, lived and practiced, comes down to this: “The beautiful thing about hip-hop is you can still maintain strength through your vulnerability,” he said. “The artists with the greatest longevity are the ones who are the most vulnerable on the microphone.”

Summary generated from the RSS feed of Chalkbeat New York. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on www.chalkbeat.org/newyork.