What Soul Food Cypher has been doing since 2012 is turning the accepted notion of Black urban music in the US only celebrating violence and misogyny on its head, into something positive in the form of ‘loving spaces’ where people can speak ‘the truth’. ‘Song tales’ are passed around like a peace pipe, tapping the old community-based singing of doo-wop groups of the 1940s and Black cappella groups, where voices extol the virtues of togetherness both in form and content. What Soul Food Cypher has ‘mainstreamed’ for a 21st-century audience is perceptions about hip-hop and rap, in particular, and Black-American music being a powerful constructive, even spiritual, force that the likes of gospel music or the sufi qawwali have been.