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#16Bars: The Smithsonian Cypher and Public Pedagogy

16 Bars / African American Music / Art History / Black Music / Black Music Research / Hip-Hop / Social Media / Uncategorized / November 7, 2017

One of hip-hop’s most theoretically rich performance practices is the cypher—a taking-turns display in which emcees alternate delivering freestyle raps, constructing a collective discursive space. While proximate to the “rap battle” tradition, the cypher is not singularly a clash of emcees; instead it is often a space for entities’ collective powers to combine, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

 

In recent years, the cypher has maintained a place in mass media discourse largely thanks to the BET Hip-Hop Awards, which have featured a blend of established professionals (Kendrick Lamar’s all-timer during the 2013 edition) and up-and-coming young rappers (Nicki Minaj in 2009, two years before “Monster”). Meanwhile, in academic circles, A. Dee Williams notably published a 2009 article, “The Critical Cultural Cypher: Remaking Paulo Freire’s Cultural Circles Using Hip Hop Culture,” in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, which connects the cypher to the work of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most important teaching tools in any woke educator’s toolkit. When you combine Freire and the cypher, you get what Freire called “a systematic acquisition of [valued] knowledge, and also the democratization of culture within the general context of fundamental democratization” (2002, p. 81), Williams argues.

 

This kind of democratizing work is an important tent pole of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has combined the historical with the public since its opening in September 2016. Case in point: its newest project—the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, a 9-CD, 120-track anthology—preserves hip-hop and rap and canonizes them in useful ways.

 

In support of the anthology’s Kickstarter campaign, which is very close to its $250,000 goal with just over a week remaining, the Smithsonian’s various entities have launched a hashtag campaign, #SmithsonianCypher, to draw attention to the anthology and its fundraising efforts. Twitter accounts from various entities tried their hand at the best bars 140 characters could contain.

 

We thought the campaign combined all of our interests here at MusiQology—a kind of public-facing performance of rich African-American musical tradition. A number of museum accounts are involved, from the NMAAHC to the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and Smithsonian Folkways. Below you’ll find some of our favorite #SmithsonianCypher tweets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 






John Vilanova



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