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Keeping Hip Hop Real: Freestyle Rap Club The Cypher Looks For Authenticity in Music
Loading ...The Cypher is a hip-hop collective at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor dedicated to perfecting the art of both spoken and written word.
It?s around 9:00 on a Tuesday evening in East Quad?s Abeng Multicultural Lounge. A few students sit in comfy armchairs listening to hip-hop beats, reciting poems to each other and discussing a mixtape they plan on recording. Kinesiology senior Walt Lacey begins freestyling and the people around him begin to clap. As the clapping gets louder, the energy in the room builds. People cheer in response to certain lines and jeer at others; a few guys start dancing and the beat gets more complicated as The Cypher?s Tuesday meeting comes into full swing.
It?s remarkable how in tune everyone is with one another. They slow down, speed up and switch the beats and harmonies at the same time, like a perfectly rehearsed orchestra ? except the synergy is all created in the moment.
The Cypher is a hip-hop collective dedicated to perfecting the art of both spoken and written word. Lacey founded it in 2004 when he saw the need for a safe space for Michigan’s student hip-hop community to practice its work.
About 15 minutes pass, and the freestyle circle ? or ?cypher,? as it?s known in the hip-hop community ? breaks. After a few minutes of chatting, Lacey walks up to a chalkboard and scrawls a few words on it: passion, legacy, heart, love, struggle, life, movement, hip hop, music, rhythm, bass and soul. These words act as prompts for a free-writing exercise, which concludes The Cypher meeting.
Engineering freshman Alex Wyszewianski and LSA junior Isaac Boachie-Ansah are two regular Cypher attendees. Wyszewianski heard about The Cypher when he went to a freestyling event on the Diag during Welcome Week. Boachie-Ansah discovered The Cypher by randomly running into a group of people freestyling on the Diag during his sophomore year. For him, attending Cypher meetings was originally just a creative outlet. But now it has become something more.
?The Cypher became a family for me,? he said.
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