Hip-hop and rap have, over time, taken on the image of bad boy (and bad girl) aesthetics made most famous in the 1980s- 90s and beyond by the likes of Black-American musicians Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy a.k.a. Sean Combs. This infused an existing musical genre with testosterone-filled, alpha male-posturings made most infamous during the Los Angeles vs New York battles between rappers – battles moving from songs to actual gunfights. Enter Soul Food Cypher, an Atlanta organisation that uses the force of freestyle rap and raw lyricism to build positive vibes keeping the community in its centre.
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.
