Freestyle Bronx / Worldwide
POETS: Juice (Terry Parker) Supernatural (Reco Price) Toni Blackman
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nick Doob Sergei Krasikov
FOOTAGE: Kevin Fitgerald, Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
To watch the full documentary, In the Moment: Poetry Duels and Improvisations click here.
Table of Contents
The Tradition
The ability to improvise in rhythm and rhyme is honored on urban streetcorners across the U.S., carrying on an age-old tradition of improvised poetry duels and competitions. In many world cultures adolescent boys have traditions of ritual insults, often involving rhyme and, in some cases, linked rhymes, in which the replies must rhyme with the insults. These traditions have been documented in Turkey and Mexico, as well as in many African countries. In the United States, these African forms evolved into the “dozens.” Among young teenage boys, insults (“raps”) were followed by counter-insults (“caps”). Described as early as the 1930s,and documented by folklorist Roger Abrahams in the 1960s, these adolescent rhymes were often obscene, with frequent references to mothers, sisters, and sexual prowess (“Ring-a-ling-a, ting, ting, tong,/Your mother’s related to old King Kong” or “I hear/ Your mother drink Thunderbird” and a lot more sexual images than that.).
In an often reprinted section of his 1969 book , H. Rap Brown discusses the dozens. “Sessions would start maybe by a brother saying, ‘Man before you mess with me you’d rather run rabbits, eat shit, and bark at the moon.’ Then, if he was talking to me, I’d tell him,
Man, you must don’t know who I am
I’m sweet peeter jeeter the womb beater
The baby maker the cradle shaker
The deerslayer the buckbinder the women finder,
Known from the Gold Coast to the rocky shores of Maine
Rap is my name and love is my game
I’m the bed tucker the cock plucker the motherfucker
The milkshaker the record breaker the population maker. . .”
In New York City, the history of rap is rooted in the South Bronx, in the parties that were held in two different housing projects – Sedgwick and Bronx River Houses. Hip hop grew up during the years that followed the burning of the Bronx in the 1960s and ‘70s, at a time that the gang culture that segregated neighborhoods was breaking down. Both Afrika Bambaataa of Zulu Nation and Kool DJ Herc brought different groups together at large, now legendary, outdoor parties. Inspired by the dozens, and also by toasts from Herc’s native Jamaica, rhymes were recited over the music at Kool DJ Herc’s parties. and a streetcorner tradition of verbal one-up-manship emerged on the streets. Kool Herc remembers Coke La Rock taking the mic when Herc was spinning records on his “Herculoid” sound system in 1973.
From the perspective of a folklorist, the burgeoning tradition was truncated when the Sugar Hill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, actually using some of Coke La Rock’s lines. This shifted the culture away from “braggin’ rights” on the street to success in the music industry. Nonetheless, this vital street tradition did not disappear. By the ‘80s and through the present, freestyle rapping in what are termed the “cypher circles” (circles of young rappers collaboratively improvising lines) has been part of “the hip hop underground.” Rhyming battles mirrored other competitive forms of one-upmanship in hip hop culture, such as break dancing & graffiti.
Field Notes
Beginning in the early 1980s, even before we achieved non-profit status, City Lore was committed to documenting to hip hop culture. At a conference on the folklore of New York City in 1983, we featured the rhythmic vocal tradition of beat boxing. Martha Cooper was among the first photographers to chronicle break dancers, and both Martha and Henry Chalfant, longtime President of City Lore’s board, photographed ’70s and early ’80s graffiti in collaboration with early graffiti artists who didn’t have cameras. Young graffiti artists pointed Chalfant and Cooper to trains they had recently tagged. The two photographers shared their images with the artists giving them a permanent record of a recently finished graffitti piece on a train as it left the yard in the morning before it was tagged by other artists or whtewashed by the city.
Chalfant directed and Elena Martínez and City Lore collaborated on the award-winning City Lore film, From Mambo to Hip-Hop. City Lore’s enduring focus on poetry has meant working with a variety of hip-hop poets in a variety of different settings, including as teaching artists. We have presented Toni Blackman, Baba Israel and Rokafella in readings. In 1994, City Lore honored DJ Kool Herc with a People’s Hall of Fame Award. City Lore folklorist Elena Martinez, in partnership with Bronx Music Heritage Center has coordinated several exhibitions featuring the work of Joe Conzo, Jr., an early photographer on the hip-hop scene who is often credited with taking hip-hop’s “baby pictures.” A special feature at the 2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival was Elena Martinez’s presentation and interview with the Bronx aerosol arts collective, TATS Cru.
Following 2001, City Lore produced The Poetry Dialogues, which brought high school students from the Muslim, Latino, African American, and Deaf communities together with master hip hop artists and elders connected to the traditions. Toni Blackman led a wonderful improvised rap conversation on the topic “Ghettos are beautiful” / “Ghettos are not,” featured above with youth poets and their mentors.For our documentary In the Moment, we secured permission from Kevin Fitzgerald to use the classic rap battle between Supernatural and Juice from his documentary Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme. We were also able to shoot Toni Blackman’s freestyle workshop with a group of engaged students seeking to master the art of freestyle improvisation.
Resources
Roger D. Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens,” Journal of American Folklore, 209-
Transcript
SUPERNATURAL
Freestyle Rapper, New York
Feel my vibe, roll with my tribe,
Sittin back and feel my vibe,
Any MC that crosses my path commits suicide,
Each and every pride that I shram ,
I cram to understand the average roll man,
With aggression,
Let you inside the freestyle session,
Never forget that I just gave you a blessin’
I started reading the dictionary just periodically as a tool to build my vocabulary, to read a rhyming dictionary later on. I was just trying to find all the words in the world that could possibly rhyme or you could fit in a sentence, so I’d say I’ve been reading it for about fifteen years. The regular dictionary, and you know, in conjunction with the rhyming dictionary.
J U ICE
Say you studyin’ my style makes me wonder buddy,
Cause you not even good enough to be my understudy.
I swear to God, you need to do some research,
I would cut his throat, but it would stain my t-shirt.
J U ICE is the sickest
You got an Afro and Dreds like Wilson Nigger Pickett
Ima do this, he can’t get with me yo
You better kick some shit that’s twice as ill as Chino
Cause if you don’t, I’m actual
Here’s a super dope nigger dissing Supernatural.
J U Ice is on the mic and I’m gonna rip it
Still heard albums with the lyrics on my snippet
Then try to do this, I’ll let him do rebuttal
He flew up in the air but he died like the shuttle.
SUPERNATURAL
Whaaawhaaawhaawhawhaaaat !?
I could switch ya, one time brotha feel the mixtcha,
Imma come over here and rip down this n***s pitcha,
Yeah, for a fact, brother like this grab a microphone,
Yeah, let me start to get this.
Now, let me take my hood off, you got the nerve,
You’re not a freestyle MC, now you gettin served,
I’m superb,
One time, yo I’m slippin’ ,
Juice you ain’t shit and it’s your name that I’m rippin,
Strippin you down,
Every time that I rock it,
Love the way I flip it inside the fiber optics.
Understudy? Yo that’s suicidal,
Fuck that shit supernatural’s ya idol …
TONI BLACKMAN
Whatever is your intention, be clear about your intention – because it makes this more meaningful. Don’t compare yourself to Supernatural who is one of the greatest freestylers on earth. Don’t worry about someone like that. Remember that improvisation is not the same as formatted songwriting. And so as we start tonight – this whole thing, make it a lyrical meditation. Don’t be afraid to fall, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Let it all go.
The cypher is the circle, it represents 360 degrees, it’s about completion and exchanging energy information and ideas. The circle is sacred, it’s a sacred space.
What’s the best advice you got this year?
Note it’s Toni not Tony
CYPHER MEMBER #1
The best advice I got was this,
If you’re building a house,
Don’t give away your bricks,
Everybody comes in they want to take,
But don’t nobody wanna help you make, not money, not nothing that you’re buildin’,
Whatchu gonna do for your own children?
If you’re out there helpin everybody else,
Like I said,
Keep your wealth to yourself.
You can give away a little, but not a lot,
Cause you can’t give away everything that you got.
STUDENT RAPPER
I’m _____ Levi, I’m sending you a couple of do, re mis. I’m hailing all the way from the Bronx. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to get this wrong.
TONI BLACKMAN
I take a stand for anyone who’s afraid to express themselves in the moment. I will coach them, I will nurture them – I will massage them into giving it a try. Cause I believe it has something to do with who we are as human beings.
Since you gotta learn that lesson to know,
Life is not about a show,
It’s not a rehearsal, you got one time yeah,
So you gotsta move out, without fear, the worry, the anxiety and your anger your rage
You gotta turn the page and write a new book,
You’ve gotta take a different kind of look,
Sometimes life will have you all shook,
Have you scared to love, have you scared to live,
Have you scared to take and have you scared to give,
And that’s not livin’,
I’m telling you that’s the best advice I was given,
Let it go, let it go, and don’t hold on, let your life flow what, let it go.
CYPHER MEMBER #2
It may all be for show,
But we just let it go,
When this is what we do high on a pedestal,
Four bars to close
I’m about to hit these streets and hit four bars til they close.
TONI BLACKMAN
It has something to do with our humanity, our identity and our experience of life. So if you go around stuck and afraid and in a box there’s parts of yourself and your life that you don’t even know.
