It might be 95 degrees on this sultry summer evening in East Point, but here in the CreateATL outdoor space, much of the heat the crowd is feeling comes from the rapid-fire lyrical craftsmanship that ricochets from the Soul Food Cypher circle. The group of 12 or so emcees start with a warmup “open cypher,” meaning no specific constraints to letting the lyrics fly, although they do need to stick to 16-bar increments set to music played by a nearby DJ.
To that end, the evening’s “enforcer,” Joseph “ J.R.” Frazier, occasionally intervenes to ensure that all participants stick to their time limit. He usually does this as gently as possible: “I love you, but it’s no longer your turn,” he tells one comrade who’s running the clock. A DJ on the turntables rotates through a wide variety of samples — including some classics from Eminem and Nas. If there’s any pause between musical selections, the emcees fill that space with beatboxing (the art of vocal percussion).
There are two rules — respect and project. When side conversations among spectators get too loud to hear what’s happening in the cypher, someone will shout out a reminder. But for the majority of the evening, the audience sways and rotates attentively, chasing each voice and flow, murmuring appreciation at each inventive rhyme or clever phrase.
Soul Food Cypher recently celebrated its 10th year of building community through the power of verse, beats and creativity. Co-founder and Executive Director Alex Acosta points to the deep historical roots of the collective’s mission. “We do it through rhyme and music, but what we are doing is very similar to our oldest ancestors getting around the campfire and telling stories,” he says.
Growing up on the East Side, including Decatur, Stone Mountain and Conyers, Acosta first got into freestyle during school lunch, when he and his classmates would sit around drumming on the tables and making up verses as they went. In 2011, when he began volunteering as a photography teacher with teens at the Whitefoord Intel Computer Clubhouse in East Atlanta, he found an immediate connection with these kids through a mutual love of hip-hop. It sparked an idea compelling enough to launch a nonprofit focused on bringing freestyle to more people, especially young people who can carry the torch onward.
A “cypher” in rap is broadly understood to be a circle with different emcees taking turns at laying down verses. But it can signify more than that. Late last year, Acosta wrote about the power of a cypher to join “people of different socio-economic, racial, and generational backgrounds together to participate in this shared experience where each individual has voice, agency, and equal license to participate.”
Over the last decade, Soul Food Cypher has reached more than 5,000 youth in the metro Atlanta area and beyond, working with a variety of partnerships, including the Boys and Girls Club. One of their long-standing partnerships has been with Experience Camp, a nonprofit that provides programming, and a one-week overnight camp, for children who have lost a parent, sibling or primary caregiver.
But at the core of Soul Food Cypher is its monthly “One Hundred” event on Sunday evenings in at CreateATL (the next is Sunday evening), which celebrates the art and longevity of freestyle.
An avid connoisseur of hip-hop history, Acosta notes that an underrecognized very early “genesis” moment for freestyle was the 1973 James Brown classic “Funky Drummer.” In the 1980s, freestyle was pretty literally defined as verses not confined by a particular rhythm or style of delivery. Then, during the 1990s, the term morphed to mean improvised lyrics — which most people associate the term with now, following the wide popularization of rap battles with the 2002 movie 8 Mile. Over the years, freestyle has played an integral role in the work of rap royalty like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) and Lil Wayne.
“The thing with hip-hop is, it’s always redefining itself,” Acosta says. “What impressed one generation isn’t necessarily going to impress a future generation because it’s already been done. I do think there are opportunities for the craft to grow.”
One of Soul Food Cypher’s “O.G.” emcees (O.G. stands for “Original Gangster,” denoting someone who’s been around for a long time and is highly respected in the scene), who’s at the forefront of the group’s mission to expand, is Būnduke Ramadan, a champion rap battler who immigrated to the United States with his parents from Egypt as a kid after his parents fled the war in South Sudan. Ramadan first encountered Soul Food Cypher while defending his title at the “freestyle Olympics” at the University of Florida in 2015.
He recalls the moment that Acosta and his crew arrived on the scene in Jacksonville: “They pulled up in a van with 12 emcees, dressed all in black. I’m like, ‘Who are these guys?’ They were really good, too. I was like, wow, they’re not playing games.” Ramadan won that contest, and when he moved up to Atlanta after graduation the following year, he reconnected with the collective.
One benefit Ramadan has observed through his work in the cypher is how regular freestyling can help release you from perfectionism and a fear of failure. “Freestyle is a form of ultimate faith,” he says. “You just start rapping and you must have complete faith that what you’re going to say will work out. It’s a form of confidence-building. It’s a form of problem-solving. It’s a form of therapy. Freestyle is just dope.”
During Soul Food Cypher’s monthly gathering, the emcees tackle a variety of specific exercises to help them hone their craft. There’s “Wordplay,” in which words as disparate as “empathize” and “vivisect” flash upon the screen in rapid succession. The goal is for emcees to incorporate those words into their next rhyme, moving as quickly as possible through as much vocabulary as possible before their allotted time is up.
Another exercise, “Scenario,” pairs two emcees at random who must then create a dialogue based on a prompt. This particular evening, there are often amusing interactions between landlord and tenant, psychiatrist and patient and a friend giving another friend the “worst dating advice ever.”
Sometimes kids as young as 5 years old join in on the cypher, and Acosta says they tend to excel because “they approach it with a certain sense of confidence.” But the cypher also presents a chance for the adults to rekindle their sense of playfulness without fear of messing up. “We can be imaginative, and we can dream,” he says. “I think it’s so important.”
At the end of their monthly gathering, the emcees participate in a segment called “Nice Bars,” the Soul Food Cypher equivalent of the rap battle where, instead of throwing disses, the emcees must shower their fellow emcee with praise. Instead of responding to ultimate takedowns, the audience oohs and aahs at the deftest compliments.
It’s this kind of “good energy” which drew in Malik “Question” Wilson, who joined the group three years ago and immediately felt like he was among family. “Everybody is just appreciative of each other,” he says. “There’s no ego. Everyone wants to help each other find new flows and patterns.”
From the time Wilson was 5 years old, he remembers wandering around inventing music on his own. “If I couldn’t hear a song by Tupac, I would make up a song in his voice,” he says. “I was freestyling and didn’t realize it.” When he discovered Soul Food Cypher, he realized there were others who shared that same specific inclination.
There are proven brain benefits to freestyle, as seen in one study 10 years ago in which neuroscientists measured brain activity in 12 professional rappers, first when they were reciting pre-written lines and then while spitting lyrics “off the dome,” as the saying goes. Researchers observed a marked increase in activity in the part of the brain associated with creativity, the prefrontal cortex. Similar studies have been conducted with jazz musicians, with similar results.
Despite these benefits and rap’s long and distinguished history (as recently as 2018, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer for his 2017 album DAMN.), the art form is still all too often dismissed and underappreciated, Acosta says. Therefore, part of Soul Food Cypher’s mission is to push up against those unaware of the complex and intellectual art form it can be.
Emcee Tiye Cochran, originally from Brooklyn, is a classically trained violinist and guitarist who feels strongly that rap is “in my code.” Cochran goes way back with Soul Food Cypher, recalling the excitement she felt at the first event she attended, at WonderRoot in 2012, when she realized that the lyrics were completely improvised. “It’s so rare to find that,” she says.
As one of few women emcees in the collective, Cochran says she’s keenly aware of the barriers facing many girls and women when it comes to putting themselves out there with freestyle. When the collective works with middle-school groups, she has noticed that usually there’s maybe one girl only who wants to get up and try it.
“For the most part, they’re so ashamed and worried about what the boys are doing,” Cochran says. “You have to get them earlier, at 8-9 year olds. By middle school, they’re so afraid of what everyone else is gonna think of them.”
But for the one girl in class who does raise a hand, Cochran says, “I’ll shower them with attention.”
Over the Covid-19 pandemic, Soul Food Cypher survived for two years by holding virtual cyphers weekly over Zoom. On the plus side, that format opened up room for people in other cities and countries to join, from as far away as Canada and Kenya. Acosta says that this ability to pivot “showed us the modes in which the art form can take place. It’s not bound to just physical space.” They resumed in-person gatherings in February.
As Soul Food Cypher spins into its second decade in the “mecca of hip-hop,” Acosta says he hopes the collective will continue to attract new voices and raise greater visibility around its positive message about the joy, creativity and camaraderie that freestyle can foster. “At the end of the day, honestly, I believe on a spiritual level that this is what I’m here to do,” he says.
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Alexis Hauk is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines including Time, the Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian magazine. An Atlanta native, Alexis has also lived in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.
