Want a degree in rap? Lupe Fiasco is here to teach you.

Few artists know the art of rapping better than Lupe Fiasco, the 12-time Grammy nominee with more than 20 million records sold.

From Rakim, the God MC himself, to J. Cole and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, hip-hop fans of all eras have paid respect to Fiasco as one of the best to rock a mic.

It made Fiasco — who burst onto the scene in 2006 with his ode to skateboarding, “Kick, Push” — a natural choice to become the first to teach rap at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute in the fall of 2025. His largely remote role is part of Peabody’s first-of-its-kind Bachelor of Music program in hip-hop, led by Baltimore’s Wendel Patrick.

Fiasco opened the curriculum to the public Thursday afternoon with a free class, “The Current State of Rap Practice: Process & Pedagogy,” at the Walters Art Museum.

“When you ask, ‘How do I get good at rapping?’ the answer is ‘What scale do you want to work in?’” Fiasco said at a lectern before roughly 150 attendees inside Graham Auditorium.

The options, he said, range from battle rapper and strip-club rapper to technical, “lyrical miracle” emcees like himself. His goal is to help students with delivery, figure of speech and generally honing their craft.

Fiasco, who also teaches rap at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke with The Banner before the class about teaching at Peabody, artificial intelligence in music and more. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How has your Peabody experience been, both professionally and personally?

It’s been a good experience. Good student, good kind of atmosphere, good vibes. You know, still feeling out the program and where it works and what needs to be tweaked. But overall, it’s been really, really good.

What’s the program like curriculum-wise?

I’m used to teaching in classes, but here it’s lessons. And they have classes here, too, but specifically for me, ’cause I focus in on the rap part, it’s just a one-on-one thing with my student. We go through a range of different kinds of things. She already operates at a really high level, so some of it is introducing new ways to approach the craft — new techniques, doubling down on certain things, expanding the horizons on certain aspects.

How many students do you work with?

Directly, I have one student here because the whole department is only five students. One is in beat-boxing, the others are in production. But with the ensemble — when they come together and do performances — I work with whoever is rapping in the space to kind of polish off some things or give advice in a certain capacity.

This isn’t a history of hip-hop class; it’s about the art of rapping itself. Is it about flows, finding pockets, writing hooks? I’m curious what you hone in on.

Good, you should be curious. It’s a mystery. [laughs] Well, I don’t teach hip-hop. That is not my expertise. So again, I specifically teach rap. And you know, here, because it’s a music school, I focus more on figures of speech and the musicality of it, the relationship to beats and things like that. And like I said, to even get into Peabody, you already had to be operating at a — I won’t say really, really high, but above-average kind of level, versus what I teach at MIT, which is starting from the ground floor and building people up.

But here, because my student is already so educated in the craft, it’s redundant to go back over some of the basics, but we do that sometimes, too. So we’ll do basic delivery drills, stuff like that. But it’s more elevated with figure of speech drills.

You were ahead of the curve on AI. (In 2023, Fiasco collaborated with Google on TextFX, an AI-powered linguistics tool designed for songwriters.) What do you think people didn’t see with AI, and where do you see it going forward with music-making?

Well, I don’t know what the public is doing. But in terms of just professionalization of it as a tool — because I have internal relationships with some of these companies, you can see they’re not trying to replace artists in that way. They’re actually hoping that people come to the tools already kind of trained in some level of music theory and have some type of musical background.

But then if they’re not, their goal is to push people to want to go back to kind of analog or get inspired and want to have a little bit more touch — like actually touching the instrument that makes the sound. And that’s been happening in very interesting ways.

So I don’t know who’s doing what, but the cycle is so quick — two, three months, it’s onto a new approach. But I think within a year, it’ll be something that’s ubiquitous to everybody’s craft in one way, and they’ll kind of figure out ways to use it to accelerate or augment their normal workflows.

You’re going on tour this year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of your debut album, “Food & Liquor.” Has your relationship changed or evolved with the record?

It hasn’t. That’s the record. We’re gonna tour it in the summer. Got some things planned around reinterpreting some of the artwork and stuff like that. But I mean, we’re gonna leave it alone. It’s the album. It did the job. It continues to do the job.

I think fans would kill me if I didn’t ask what you’re working on next.

None of their business. I’m teaching.

Are you going to extend your time with Peabody?

I don’t know, perhaps. Maybe. There’s other things that I want to pursue on the pedagogical front. So we’ll see. But I’m definitely down for the long haul in terms of making sure the program is rich and authentic and actually provides utility.