Cyphers: Hip-Hop and Improvisation

Abstract

Hip-hop music and culture is a chiaroscuro of social consciousness and mainstream commodification, a chameleonesque art form that adapts to every environment it encounters, a personal saviour and communitarian mobilizer born out of a disenfranchised youth movement in the post-industrial urban nightmare of America’s neglected ghettos.1 Hip-hop’s lineage of hagiography consists of graffiti writers, breakers, DJs, and emcees who animate the black postmodern ethos through raps that contain ad-lib logorrhea, near-assonance, and gritty vocab with gunfire punctuation, announcing with bravado to an oppressive white world that the carcinoid Other has adopted the master’s tools and things will never be the same. Hip-hop music, like jazz, is an improvisational art form that draws from the long history of disenfranchised people repurposing the tools of the master to create new forms of art.