Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher
Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I'm studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton's 2018 Loop Summit.
Ableton recently posted the video of Toni's talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, as she does all of her talks. This is the level of authentic confidence that I aspire to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W4yro7ESWU
I made a remix of Toni's talk, combining it with some of the music she mentions and other thematically related tracks. Listen here:
<a href="https://ethanhein.bandcamp.com/album/dissertation-mixtape">Dissertation Mixtape by Ethan Hein</a>
The main musical backdrop is the instrumental from "Step Into Da Cipher" by Brand Nubian. For variety, I also use the source of that song's breakbeat, "Momma Miss America" by Paul McCartney - Sir Paul himself plays those drums. After Toni talks about wanting to be a dope MC, I bring in a line from "Step Into A World (Rapture's Delight)" by KRS-One. When she talks about free jazz, I use "Mars" by John Coltrane, and for her mention of Sweet Honey In The Rock, I use their iconic recording of "Eyes On The Prize."
When Toni defines the word "cypher," I splice in some lines from "Step Into Da Cipher," "Hater Players" by Mos Def and Talib Kweli, "The World Is Yours" by Nas, and "Lose Yourself" by Eminem. When she talks about freestyling, I use the instrumental from "Backseat Freestyle" by Kendrick Lamar. When she talks about using A Tribe Called Quest to create a suitable vibe for creativity, I use the instrumental from "Electric Relaxation." Finally, at the end, when she leads the crowd in beatboxing and singing, I mix in "Believe (DJ Meditation Mix)" from Toni's own hip-hop meditation album. (I have previously remixed other tracks from that album.) Being in the room for the freestyle felt like a group meditation, and the experience supports my belief that there is not much distance between meditation practice and musical improvisation generally.
The remix is a great research methodology if you're working with audio data. In the course of making it, I listened to the recording of Toni's talk a hundred times. I listened for the content, of course, but also for the sound, the pacing, the dynamics. These are aspects that I would not have been so attentive to if I were just transcribing the words. Toni's speech is highly musical, which makes sense for an emcee. I didn't do any quantizing of her speech to fit the beats, but it often fits neatly anyway. Repeated listening is also quite different from watching the video. Without seeing Toni's face and gestures, one hundred percent of my attention goes to her voice quality and speech mannerisms. I noticed that she sounds anxious at times, with her voice uncharacteristically cracking. That's understandable; I know from experience how vulnerable you feel talking on camera.
I approached the editing with the intent of preserving Toni's flow. I edited out her stumbles and asides, and also shortened some pauses in order to align key moments to musical phrase transition points. It was a balancing act between following the timing of her talk and respecting the hypermeter. Listeners probably aren't counting through the phrases, but it feels intuitively better if things repeat in musically logical units. Here's the Ableton session:
I'm been listening to rap since I was a kid, but mostly in a passive and inattentive way. As a serious student of the music, I'm a newcomer. So it helps me to immerse myself through repeated listens. Just like I had to listen closely and repeatedly to Toni's talk while doing the remix, I had to do the same with all the tracks that I spliced in. I had never heard the Brand Nubian song before I started the project, but now I've listened through it dozens of times, both the full and instrumental versions, and its sample sources too. Ordinary listening can't give that kind of immersion. I wonder whether the remix method would work this well with other kinds of music. Both my remix and its subject matter are built from editing together existing audio in order to make intertextual connections. The form and content align beautifully.