On Thursday, Jan. 24, D.H. Hill’s Fishbowl Forum was the epicenter of earth-shaking bass and clever wordplay, as the area was used to host a rap cypher for an entry of NC State’s State of Sound Stories, with particular entry in the State of Sound event series focused on the members of Cypher Univercity, a collective of rappers that have found a home at NC State’s own weekly rap cypher.
The State of Sound event series was started in April 2017 by Jason Evans Groth, a digital media librarian at NCSU Libraries. The series aims to highlight the various student and local artists of various mediums at NC State.
“The idea is there’s so many ways to encounter people’s creative work,” Groth said. “There’s an opportunity for people who are all brought together for a single reason — in this case, we all happen to be affiliated with NC State — to build a community of people who do lots of different things outside of that by establishing that connection.”
While State of Sound is a relatively new project done by NCSU Libraries, its inspiration was the My Hunt Library project back in 2013, as Groth mentioned. When Hunt Library first opened, visitors were asked to share any pictures they took with NCSU Libraries via social media. The digital libraries team collected them and created a gallery, which was displayed on the video wall in Hunt. The collection is still displayed occasionally.
Several regular participants of the cypher and members of Cypher Univercity gathered in the forum to talk about what brought them to NC State and how they train their talents.
“It’s like you’re training the subconscious mechanism in your brain to take all the words from your active vocabulary,” said Shep Bryan, an NC State alumnus and co-founder of Cypher Univercity. “As you practice more, you start to intuit how those words connect.”
Another rapper, Rome “Eternal the M.C.” Jeterr, had a different, less complicated answer for the crowd.
“It’s automatic, like a motor skill,” Jeterr said. “You know how you learn to ride a bike and then after you learn you don’t have to think about it anymore? We train so much rhyming and learning different words that we can just think about what happened today and put it in a rhyme.”
The cypher at NC State had a much less formulaic startup. In 2010, roughly 30 local rappers were invited out to the Free Expression Tunnel for an album shoot and party, Groth said. No one had any intention of performing that night. However, once the attendees noticed how many rappers were there, someone started beatboxing, leading to today’s cypher events.
“We had all done shows around here, and things had gotten a little too political,” said local rapper Nick Tucson. “We’re culture first, so we were like ‘Let’s take away the shows and get back to the essence.’ The essence is what we care about.”
From then on, the cypher would occur every Monday night, regardless of who attended or the weather conditions. The rappers mentioned one occasion where they held a cypher in the middle of Hurricane Sandy back in 2012.
Cypher Univercity’s founders are aware of hip hop’s patriarchal nature and cite this as a reason why they feel it’s important to welcome contributors of various identities and backgrounds.
“It’s male-dominated by culture,” said Andrew “Jrusalam” Weaver, another Cypher Univercity co-founder. “We recognize that and try to diminish it and make it comfortable and embrace everyone. No matter where you come from, we want everyone to engage us, because we need more diversity of voices to challenge the things we may say.”
Of the Cypher Univercity co-founders, Bryan is the only one with any background at NC State. Despite that, the university still allows them to have a home at the Free Expression Tunnel, in part due to their Code of the Cypher, as recounted by Bryan: Respect, project, keep the peace, f— the camera, and be original. Bryan cites this as the reason Cypher Univercity’s growth has been so successful.
“This code unites us under a loose coalition of shared values,” Bryan said. “That’s how we’ve been able to take this concept and seed it at other universities.”
Cypher Univercity has been able to establish cyphers at several other universities in North Carolina, including Appalachian State and UNC-Chapel Hill .
“No matter how many campuses the cypher goes to, it started here,” Tucson said. “The cypher’s home is NC State.”
Groth also encourages a wide range of voices and sounds to participate in State of Sound. Anyone is allowed to submit their work to the library for curation, so long as they are affiliated with NC State in some way and their submission was “recorded with intention,” and can be anything from music, to slam poetry or podcasts.
The current collection can be found on the State of Sound Bandcamp. Cypher Univercity’s rap cyphers take place every Monday night at 10 p.m. More information on NC State Cypher and Cypher Univercity can be found on their respective Facebook pages.
