A rap artist from Hartford, Conn., came to Northwestern four years ago to pursue a degree in engineering, but he found the Evanston campus unprepared for his arrival.

“There was this huge void,” said Andrew Davis II, known by his peers as Dre Dub. “There was really no branch of culture for hip-hop and rap on the campus. There were just a few scattered people who liked to do it on the side. I got here and I met one rapper, and only heard about a DJ or two.”

Dre Dub said the absence of this community didn’t discourage him, but instead motivated him to create a new one.

“I saw opportunities where nothing existed,” he said.

Today, Dre Dub is majoring in Learning and Organizational Change at SESP. He said he realized that his passion lies in the business of hip-hop, rap and music, and he couldn’t imagine pursuing anything else.

“Hip-hop is more than just music,” he said. “It’s the lifestyle of the urban culture.”

Dre Dub describes this urban culture as an umbrella that encompasses rap, hip-hop and R&B artists and dancers as well as DJs and def poets. Dre Dub said he knows urban culture has a bad reputation because of its frequent association with violence, drugs and gangs.

“That stuff does go on a lot,” he said. “I had friends who were hustlers, who sold drugs and were in gangs. You can make a lot of money that way, so it’s very appealing.”

Dre Dub said he recalled several times when he considered participating in what he calls the “gangster” lifestyle.

“I was young and I saw everyone else making money and buying nice stuff and getting the girls,” he said. There were a few days when he said his classes were boring and so slow that he wanted to just be done with school forever. “But this thought was never more than a trickle.”

Dre Dub said his father helped him stay focused.

“I’ve always had a really strong relationship with my father,” he said. “He raised my brother and me to look at that lifestyle for what it really is and at how dangerous it is to be a drug dealer or a gangster.”

“Kids who grow up in environments exposed to hip-hop culture typically don’t have a lot of parental guidance,” he said. “There’s a lot of gang violence, and violence centered on drug abuse and drug dealing. That’s not the kind of environment that fosters the breed typically selected for admission into an institution like Northwestern. My being here is definitely an exception.”

Dre Dub said his admission reflects Northwestern’s minority recruitment initiatives, which a 2002 Medill News Service article credited with annually increasing the percent of minority students at the university.

“They’re starting to reach out to kids who didn’t have the opportunity to get into prestigious universities before, and they’re finding the diamonds in the rough from areas that foster hip-hop culture,” he said.

Dre Dub said that there is an absence of an urban culture on campus because urban minority students assume they must abandon their culture when they come to Northwestern. As a freshman, Dre Dub said he was an exception, though. He began attending events within the black community and passing out CDs he had recorded himself.

“Hip-hop is more accepted in the black community,” he said. “That’s where the demand for it is.”

Dre Dub said he vividly remembers his first performance outside of the urban sphere at an outdoor concert for Northwestern’s Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

“I came out with one microphone and some beats in the background and got two different reactions,” he said. “Some people were like ‘Wow! This is different!’ and they kind of got into it. Everyone else looked at me, like ‘What is this stuff?’ They weren’t used to it and they wanted the rock bands back on stage.”

Dre Dub said his efforts these past four years have focused on reviving the hip-hop culture of the black community on campus. Now, after a major development this past summer, he plans on expanding his influence beyond Evanston into Chicago.

After three years of struggling to find other artists who shared his passion, Dre Dub founded The Hustle Group, a growing network of hip-hop, rap, spoken word and DJ artists from Northwestern. He plans on promoting these artists by making The Hustle Group into a record label.

“We wanted to have a presence on the entire campus, and our turning point was an SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon] fraternity party that was packed,” he said. “The Hustle Group got a lot of loving from the crowd and ever since then we’ve gotten requests to perform and people come up to us about our music.”

Dre Dub said he believes the group has a promising future, but that certain things have to fall into place.

“You need a job in order to really make this happen, and I know this is what I want to do with my life,” he said.

When he graduates from Northwestern this spring, Dre Dub said he feels confident in taking the next steps.

“This is a movement,” he said. “The Hustle Group is not going to be just a cliché, stereotypical hip-hop record label. I’m taking the ambition, the raw entrepreneurship, and ‘go-get-it’ attitude of a street hustler but filtering out the illegal risks and crime, merging them with prestige and legitimacy instead. That’s what I try to embody. I’m from the hood, but here I am at Northwestern, and that is the image, the message, The Hustle Group wants to portray when we do present ourselves to Chicago.”