The Tao of the Cyph

My journey to the Cyph was a winding path, it started on day in high school when we had a substitute one day so it was like a party in the classroom. The bros Red Child and Black Dragon and I were trading verses from our rhyme pads when the substitute got bewildered by the flows and sent me to ISS, where I linked up with more spitters and we had a session in detention.

Years later Black Dragon and I were working on music together, he was the aspiring DJ and I was an aspiring Emcee, and he got involved with the local Hip Hop scene with an artist named C-Minor, who introduced him to Lazurus and the 1100 Hunters, got me outside of my comfort zone and introduced me to the real underground Hip Hop artist in the area, and I immediately knew I had to step my game up. In 2010 I saw on C-Minor’s facebook page photos from a Cypher at the free expression tunnel, I knew I should have been there and made sure to show up to the second Cypher.

That time the whole city came out and it was a madhouse inside the tunnel that night, Lazurus had everybody put they fists in the middle and we called it Monday Night Raw. We rocked out every monday for a year or more and some drama happened and it killed the energy so it kind of sputtered out in the springtime of 2011. Say$o hit us up and said we should bring the cypher back, so we worked together to bring people out to the cypher and make it a party, and then we would film it and turn it into a movie.

That was when the Cyph took off, inspired one to happen in Durham and at A&T, and at first we called the movement “iCypherGlobal” but then we had an assembly and came up with the name Cypher Univercity, and formulated a code, because Cypher means Code, so the Code of the Cyph is a Cipher of the Cypher. We treated it like an organism that needed to be fed beats, bars, and energy, or goal was to generate good chemistry with the people through Hip Hop and they would spread that good feeling throughout the week. And we established a mission to spread the Cyph to many other campuses throughout NC, and we carried that mission out relentlessly.

When Say$o was taken from us in 2014 it brought everybody together and our official logo became his tattoo, a stylized Omi, the Arabic word for mother, to us it was perfect because the cypher is the mother of culture. In 2015, the originator of the UNC Cyph, Rowdy had us beat a world record for the longest cypher, it was 8 of us going non stop for 13 hours. After that I never wanted to rap again, my brain was fried and completely empty, I had flowed all I could flow. It was a moment of Clarity for sure. Not only have many of my cypher brothers linked up with the Cyph in Heaven, but both of my sons were born from it. The last time I saw my God brother Joop was at the Cyph, sometimes I still feel him around on Monday nights, listening deeply.

After a decade and then some of being a Cyph head, I have noticed many things it has in common with the philosophy of the Tao, our beats and rhymes are the yin and yang to the empty circle of our Wuji formation, and our plethora of 10,000 styles reflects the interactions of the 5 elements of Hip Hop. The cypher is free medicine for the people, as I have seen many arrive downtrodden and leave uplifted and actuallized. So we carry the torch as it was passed to us by the 1100 Hunters and carry out the mission to spark weekly freestyle cypher in every city around the world bc iCypherGlobal. “Why?” Because I Say$o. “Uno Uno!!!” “Cypha Cypha!!!” Where the God At? W-T-G-A? “G-A-T-C! It’s Gods at the Cypher cuz Gods at the Cypher” #000