Mike Bolds ’08 told us he was surprised he was going to be a WesCeleb. As an RA, a tutor at Traverse Square, an exhibited artist in Skittles (an annual student of color show that debuted this year), a performer in “Invisible Man,” and with a thesis already in development, we were surprised he hadn’t been one sooner.

L: So we noticed you just came from Traverse Square. How did you first get involved?

M: I started second semester of freshman year. I was looking for something to do with an after-school program, and I contacted Leah Cappellucci ’06, who was in charge of it back then. She graduated last year, and I just came through one day, and I’ve just been there ever since.

J: Have you been working with a lot of the same kids all these years?

M: There’s one little boy; his name’s Mackenzie. I remember he came in when he was two. He couldn’t really talk, and he could barely walk. He was just a real little guy. Now he’s four, so he can run, he jumps, he makes full sentences, and he has a little attitude sometimes. He’s grown into a little man. I don’t have any younger siblings, so it’s kind of amazing to watch a transition that dramatic. I’ve been working with kids for a while, but when Kenzie first came back earlier this year and he was speaking in full sentences, I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I remember holding this guy when he was two, and he didn’t know the difference between white and green, and now he’s telling me where I can go.

L: I know you’re also an RA in the Hewitts this year. Why did you want to be an RA?

M: I didn’t necessarily have good experiences with my own RAs in previous years, so I said, you know, I think that someone needs to be responsible, and I think that I can do a pretty good job. I’ve been doing community organizing and been responsible for people for a while, why don’t I try it at Wesleyan with my own peers? That’s the main reason: I thought I’d be good at it, and I think I’m okay. I guess you can ask my residents.

J: What kind of programs do you do?

M: I’ve done a lot of collaborative programs because I do so many different kinds of things and know so many different kinds of people. I usually try to find a way to do programs that don’t just fit in with one particular thing. So, for example, back in Halloween season I did this collaboration with T-Square and with La Casa where we took a bunch of kids up from Traverse Square and we went and got them pumpkins and did pumpkin carving and face painting. I try to do programs that bring a lot of disparate communities at Wesleyan together, so my residents can actually benefit from the connections I have.

L: I know you’re also going to be performing for “Invisible Man.” How did you get involved with that?

M: “Invisible Man” started as a show a couple of years ago. There used to be a women of color show called “Essence of She” and “Invisible Man” was the male equivalent. It kind of fell off for a couple years, but it came back I want to say, two years ago, and after it came back a group of men of color said, you know what? We really like this. We like it so much we should make a group, and the group should do much more than just make the show. The group should help [us] educate one another, it should be a support network, it should be a resource, and the show is something that we do every year to try and make it into a tradition. This will be the second year I’m in it. It’s tonight [Wednesday], and it should be really good. We change it a lot every year, and I think it gets bigger and better each time.

J: You said you’ve turned this into a year-round thing. What do you do other than the show?

M: We’re actually organizing a forum on police education in light of recent police brutality on campus. We’re trying to teach students what their rights are and what they can do, to try and get different resources for people in the Middletown community and in the Wesleyan community. We figure there’s a lot of forums where people come and talk about issues, but we wanted to do something that’s more pragmatic, more the idea of, okay, how do you deal with certain situations when they arise?

L: You were also in Skittles last year, and you had said that you dropped the studio art major?

M: It was technically a mistake. I never actually declared the studio art major, I was just on that path. All my classes were geared towards it, and it would have been the most common-sense thing for me to declare, but then I decided to go in a whole opposite direction.

L: Do you plan to do a thesis next year?

M: I actually gave a lecture on a portion of my thesis back in November.

J: You’ve already started it?

M: Yeah, since I’m a Mellon Undergraduate Fellow. I actually got a really cool opportunity because Dean Danny Teraguchi told me about the Deans’ Colloquium. Back in the summer we had to do presentations on a research topic, so I was sitting there as a sophomore like, what am I going to do? But then I came up with something, and [after we presented] Dean Teraguchi approached me and said he was interested in using students as a resource of knowledge, because typically these colloquiums are reserved for faculty and visiting people. He asked if I’d be willing to present, and I said sure, and I really kind of went home and digested how big of an opportunity this was. So in November I presented a portion of my thesis, and it talked about the “50 Cent effect.” My thesis is looking at how hip-hop is a form of pedagogy in urban black communities. It’s a way that folks learn. Looking at changes in the music, both as a commercial product and as a cultural product, you can understand some of the changes in social, educational, and economic formation in these communities. I’m unfortunately suggesting that a lot of urban black men just aren’t learning; they aren’t interested in learning, they don’t care about development, and that’s not true. It’s just that they’re not necessarily learning in the ways that are respected. So I’m looking at, well, if we know that one of the primary ways people learn is culturally, through the art that they make, then how do changes in the art affect changes in the way people learn?

J: What did you say about him? That his influence was bad?

M: No, basically I was saying that you have a street level industry and a commercial industry, and there’s kind of the idea that there’s a type of music and a type of culture that was pretty much just circulated in and produced only in the realms of black and Latino communities in the cities. There’s a whole level of commercial product, you know on MTV, on VH1. 50 Cent came along and changed that. He bridged a lot of these things together, because he was an artist that established a street market first, changed the way the street market functioned. He kind of changed the whole structure and created a new structure, so I call that the “50 Cent effect.”

J: Now he has a Vitamin Water.

M: Yeah, it extends far beyond him as a person, because whether or not he sells another million records tomorrow or never moves another copy, he still had a long-term effect on the industry and on the culture as well, because his narrow archetype, the type of music he does has influenced what is seen as legitimate in the corporate sphere and in the cultural sphere. So everyone from the guy on the corner to the guy in the suite that’s making rap music, black, Latino, and in between, from 13 to 35, in terms of growing up in different cultural places, he’s kind of the barometer for what’s seen as being legitimate. So I looked at what some problems were with that, with the idea that everyone’s using one model for a reference, what it means when they’re all trying to be like one person.