Cyphers: Hip-Hop and Improvisation

Abstract

The whole circumference is a protection, at the same time it's an expression, so the [cypher] circle is there and it seems to be almost claustrophobic, but everyone is free and they want to be tight like that, together like that.(Abiodun Oyowele qtd. in Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme) Hip-hop music and culture is a chiaroscuro of social consciousness and mainstream commodification, a chameleonesque art form that adapts to every environment it encounters, a personal saviour and communitarian mobilizer born out of a disenfranchised youth movement in the post-industrial urban nightmare of America's neglected ghettos.1 Hip-hop's lineage of hagiography consists of graffiti writers, breakers, DJs, and emcees who animate the black postmodern ethos through raps that contain ad-lib logorrhea, near-assonance, and gritty vocab with gunfire punctuation, announcing with bravado to an oppressive white world that the carcinoid Other has adopted the master's tools and things will never be the same.Hip-hop music, like jazz, is an improvisational art form that draws from the long history of disenfranchised people repurposing the tools of the master to create new forms of art. 2To cypher is to rap, break, beatbox tightly together in a circle where each person just might get a moment in the spotlight.To cypher is to borrow and to lend, to playfully freewheel through whilst taking an exacting care for each word and carefully considering all the sounds, meanings, and interpretations.It is to fight back, to borrow, to steal, to represent, and to collaborate, whilst suddenly-surprisingly-at times aggressively claiming your own voice, your own right to speak.A cypher is a gathering of rappers, beatboxers, and/or breakers in a circle, extemporaneously making music together.In recent years, the cypher has also grown to include the crowd and spectators who are integral to maintaining the energy of a given cypher.In a cypher, one emcee will rap about a certain topic, which is quickly taken up or flipped by another emcee who plays off the prior words and themes.Each artist takes his or her respective turn, much like in a jazz solo.Cyphers flow freely between diverse performers who improvise their words, sounds, or movements to create a complex matrix of sharing.The circle can go on continuously, as long as emcees, beatboxers, dancers, and the crowd keep the fluidity of the cypher going.The cypher is welcoming and thus models a pedagogy that is inclusive and improvisational in nature.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.