San Francisco -- "Hip hop hooray! Ho!" Professor Rickey Vincent is in the house, er, classroom in Burk Hall at San Francisco State.

Listening to him in the high-tech mini-auditorium are most of the 96 students enrolled in his Hip Hop Workshop, officially Black Studies 256.

"Today's April 4," Vincent announces. "Anybody know what day that is?"

Without giving them a chance to answer, mostly because all he gets is blank stares, he says: "It's the day Martin Luther King was murdered. And it changed everything. . . . Two days later, on April 6, the Oakland police started a war with the Black Panthers. They killed Bobby Hutton and shot Eldridge Cleaver."

If you're wondering what politics and social movements have to do with hip hop -- you're not alone. So are most of the students.

Here it comes.

Vincent rolls a 1991 Public Enemy video titled "By the Time I Get to Arizona." Scenes of blacks being forced to the back of buses in the South, of having dogs sicced on them and being battered by waterhoses, flash by. The video ends with a scene depicting the governor of Arizona being blown up. Arizona, you might remember, initially opposed making King's birthday a holiday.

The video, controversial when it was released because of the explosion, was actually "a statement of love for Martin Luther King's legacy," Vincent declares.

That prompts the students to begin talking about how the media focused on the violence against the governor but ignored the context of the violence endured during the civil rights movement.

It's quite a lesson, an interesting connection for the students. But it's not over.

Vincent then has a student teaching assistant spin a 1973 Mandrill LP. The cut, which is not announced, is "Two Mysterious Women," and students begin to murmur. The record uses the same beat in Public Enemy's "Arizona."

Unaware that the Mandrill song was recorded more than a decade before Public Enemy sampled it, many of the students buzz about how Public Enemy was being ripped off.

The young men and women who make up the hip hop generation may be familiar with the four pillars of hip hop culture -- rapping, disc jockeying, graffiti and break dancing -- but not their history.

"Some students come in with a different idea of what the class is," said Brooke Wilson, a 19-year-old freshman from Berkeley. "They think it's a party you get credit for."

They soon find out that although they must develop a performance involving one or more of the pillars of hip hop, there also are lectures, tests and an inch-thick bound reader of materials Vincent has assembled from essays, newspaper articles and unpublished books. There also are a written midterm, occasional quizzes and class participation, a research paper, a radio review, a concert review and a final exam.

Vincent, a graying and a self-styled funk generation Baby Boomer (he's 39 years old), is considered an O.G. (Original Gangsta) by these young adults, and he's respected because he respects the youngsters' music. And because he draws the connection between their culture and the larger society.

The class, Wilson says, "is a lot more mental work. You're presented with ideas about what hip hop has meant for black people, but not just black people,

all races in America."

Tomas Almaguer, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies, said the course was proposed last year and "sailed" through the Committee on Courses, which approves proposed new courses. A second committee, made up of eight associate deans, which could have flagged it, also approved.

"It was a pretty quick turnaround. Because it was a course on music, Creative Arts could have rejected it, but it did not," Almaguer said. "The feeling was it was good to have a course that might be of interest to students,

and I think it was proven to be successful when 120 students signed up for the fall class."

Davey D, a KMEL disc jockey who has studied hip hop for decades, said that the course "is filling a void, giving voice to a perspective that is not always embraced."

"It's legitimate to examine the cultural perspectives of hip hop . . . We know it was born out of the Bronx, where some of the most downtrodden and oppressed people are, and has gone around the world. "We study Greek philosophy, for instance," Davey D continued. "There's no denying hip hop's influence with the rest of the world, and although it's young in its present incarnation -- it's been around 30 years and worthy of study."

Black Studies Professor Oba T-Shaka, who chaired the Black Studies department at the time, said that once the class was suggested, it was obvious that "Rickey Vincent was the logical person to teach the course.

"He's a musicologist grounded in funk, which is the bridge to hip hop and rap, and rap is the intersection to mark how all genres (in African culture) connect," T-Shaka said, referring to African oral tradition.

T-Shaka met Vincent when Vincent first arrived at SFSU as an undergraduate astronomy major and a true funk aficionado.

After transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, Vincent became a DJ on college radio, where he could spin "the weird stuff," which for him wasn't so weird.

"I'd play George Clinton."

For the unhip, that's Parliament-Funkadelic -- the Mothership Connection, which most people consider the funkiest funk that ever was with lyrics to match the beat, which was on the one rather than the traditional two and four. .

One nation under a groove/getting down just for the funk of it. One nation and we're on the move/ nothing can stop us now . . . . .

It was the astronomy -- not the funk -- that went by the wayside when Vincent transferred. He earned an Ethnic Studies degree at Cal in 1987.

He returned to SFSU to get a master's degree in that subject in 1993. He's still DJ-ing-- on KPFA -- and has written a well-regarded book, "Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of The One" (St. Martin's, $15.95).

Now, he says, when he plays a Clinton jam from his P-Funk days, "I'm playing one of the legends."

Vincent is a legend in some sense, too.

He had enough clout to get George Clinton not only to write the foreword for his book on funk, but also to get Clinton to visit his class when he taught one on funk.

Last semester, in the hip hop class, he had enough juice to draw to the class Afrika Bambaataa, one of the great early practitioners of hip hop.

The class has succeeded in attracting students outside the department as well as across race lines -- students such as Cheryl Parrocha, who plans to graduate later this month with a degree in health science. She took the course last semester and is back this semester as a teaching assistant.

"I was exposed to hip hop when I was little," she said. "I remember going to break dancing shows in the '80s with my brothers. . . . As I grew up I always found myself going to underground hip hop shows. In 1999, I learned how to use a turntable."

Taking the class, she not only got to hone skills in scratching and emceeing, but she learned that the music of her generation is not isolated from earlier musical forms.

"They know I live in the past," said Vincent on a recent day after class. "It's a running joke. But to keep the class fresh, I've brought in guests."

The guests have ranged from rapper Boots Riley of the (rap group) Coup and KMEL and KPFA DJ Davey D to Tajai Massey from Souls of Mischief and DJ Qbert, formerly of the Invisibl Scratch Picklz. Professor T-Shaka visited to talk about jazz and its connections to hip hop.

"We've had activists come and talk about their work in the community," Vincent said. "But what's important about all these guests is that they all have committed their lives to this culture. It's way beyond a hobby. It's a life force within them. They all said it -- no matter what aspect of hip hop they're involved in."

So what's the relevance of the course?

"I want to get the students focused on issues and how they fit in the real world," Vincent said. "Hip hop tends to be isolated from other issues in the world. This is a way to pull it all together."

"Having a class also says now you're in the academy, which is a battle, and that says it's legitimate," Vincent continued. "It's validating hip hop and these young people who have dedicated or identified themselves through hip hop. "

For a generation that has grown up on hip hop beats, with rapping, rhyming DJs, break dancing to the beat and marking turf with spray cans, the connections are enlightening.

"I learned a lot about the roots," said Michale Baker, 20, a sophomore in the film cinema department. "It was great to have the documentation from the beginnings in the Bronx and the Caribbean influence. But we don't really know about the funk, about Sly Stone, James Brown and George Clinton or (hip hop's connection to) the roots of the drum from Africa."

Baker, who was born in 1981, said the class "adds perspective to life."

And Davey D said that's as good a reason as any for teaching hip hop to the hip hop generation.

"Just because I grew up black doesn't mean I know black history," said Davey D. ''Just because I wear my hat backwards and sagging pants (doesn't mean that's) all there is to hip hop. The classroom setting is a place to understand the rich history and the connection between musical genres and the social situations that gave rise to hip hop.

"So, they get a deeper understanding of what it means living a hip hop lifestyle."

There are numerous Web sites to hlep keep up with the goings-on in the world of hip hop:

-- www.AllHipHop.com

-- www.B-Boys.com

-- www.Daveyd.com

-- www.Okayplayer.com

-- www.Platform.net

-- www.Rapstation.com

-- www.Rapworld.com