In so doing, they deploy impressive musical and verbal skill with seeming effortlessness. In the cypher discussed below, the emcees make their personalities and identities felt immediately and strongly. I will argue that rap is ordered and limited by strict musical conventions, but that these conventions are optimized to promote elaborative and liberating expression. Like any culture, hip-hop can be viewed as “ordered, limiting, and pervasive”, or as “fertile, elaborative, and liberating” (MacDougall, 1998, p. Only by evaluating the music by its own value system can we recognize its beauty. For example, the predictability of the beats is a necessity to support the complex play of text, pitch, rhythm and timbre in the emcees’ flow. However, closer engagement with improvised rap quickly reveals its depth. Improvisation likewise has a low status in academic settings, because spontaneous musical expression supposedly has less significance than composed works (Nettl, 1974, p. Along with electronic dance music, rap in its instrumental aspect is the most repetitive popular form in American history, and schooled musicians are socialized to be contemptuous of repetition (McClary, 2004). Instead, they point to rap’s supposed lack of melody, or the programmed and sampled beats.
While I do not believe that rap needs academic validation, it is important to me that my fellow educators understand and appreciate the beauty of this music, so if they will not embrace it, they might at least do less to impede it.įew rap haters will admit to being motivated by racial or class animus. I have heard a demoralizingly large number of musicians and educators opine that rap is not music at all. While hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and possibly in the world (Hooton, 2015), the American music academy does not afford it much respect. Freestyle rap in particular is an underappreciated art. I chose the cypher as the subject of ethnographic study because it crystallizes so much of what I love about rap generally.
Freestyling is to rap what jam sessions are to jazz: an improvisational form that demands both technical proficiency and a relaxed, casual confidence. A cypher is a group performance where rappers take turns performing improvised verses. In this paper, I discuss a rap cypher held during a session of NYU’s CORE Music Program on March 3, 2018.
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