Tonight at 8:30 in Hotung Café, WMFO, "Freestyle Cyphers" and Leedz Entertainment will be presenting "Spit It: A Tufts Rap Battle." Featuring eight emcees vying for a $150 prize, the battle will showcase talents rarely seen on the Tufts campus.
Tufts and hip-hop culture go together like peanut butter and spaceships -- not a combination that springs to mind or seems at all likely. That said, step into the WMFO studio on the top floor of Curtis Hall any Thursday night between 11 p.m. and midnight and bear witness to a den of rappers ferociously tearing each other apart.
These weekly skirmishes are, for the most part, the work of senior Isaac Emmanuel, known on the mic as Viceaverse. Emmanuel is the mastermind behind "Freestyle Cyphers," a weekly radio show on WMFO which features the work of Tufts emcees, producers, DJs and beatboxers. The radio show began broadcasting this past September after Emmanuel decided, with some support from his roommate, WMFO general manager and senior Drew Frankel, to take his passion for hip-hop and share it via the airwaves to the Tufts community.
Emmanuel made his first attempt to get Tufts hip-hop heads together last year. He put fliers up on campus calling all emcees to the Hodgdon lounge for weekly rap battles, drawing a few students. The small group who did report to these gatherings formed a bond that carried over to the radio show.
Emmanuel did not start freestyling until he was in college, when a rap song, Jurassic 5's "Quality Control," caught his ear and sparked his imagination. This story of recently discovering an interest in rap is common among tonight's competitors. These enthusiasts, however, are not in the business of fronting, a hip-hop term for pretending to be something one is not. Emmanuel and the other freestylers understand that they are not gangsters living in the ghetto; rather, they are embracing an art form and making it their own.
"We try to keep it real," Emmanuel said. Junior Andrew Moshman, alias A-Puff, a "Freestyle Cyphers" regular, added, "We keep it live. We keep it active."
Though the phrase "Tufts emcees" may raise some eyebrows, almost 20 students rhyme weekly on "Freestyle Cyphers."
"No one expects you to freestyle as a hobby," Emmanuel said.
Neither Emmanuel nor Moshman have plans to pursue careers as rappers. These jive Jumbos and their hip-hopping cohorts are exactly what one would expect them to be: regular, everyday Tufts students. Emmanuel, is an economics major, and Moshman is a pre-dental Spanish major.
Two students who DJ for "Freestyle Cyphers" will be spinning the backing beats at "Spit It" senior Chinua Green of Forced Triple DJs and sophomore Kenneth Lee, aka DJ Connect. Other emcees run the gamut from fraternity brothers to athletes to members of Tufts Emergency Medical Service (TEMS) and everything in between, but all harbor passions for hip hop.
In the battles, tonight's main attraction, two emcees at a time will take turns busting rhymes over beats provided by the DJs. None of their rhymes are pre-written, so their flows, or pattern of rhyming, might be a bit choppy, yet the feat is impressive nonetheless. In typical rap battles, the emcees diss one another until a winner is selected based on audience reaction. The emcees that participate in the "Freestyle Cyphers" battles, however, don't just take digs at each other; they are friends, and tend to keep the atmosphere light and fun.
The competition will consist of a preliminary round of four battles, the winners of which will proceed to a semi-final showdown. Those still standing after the semi finals will go on to the final battle for the prize money and bragging rights. Each battle will be two minutes long blocked into 30-second increments, so each competitor will have two turns per battle. Along with the eight emcees who will be competing, "Spit It" will feature performances by Turbo, a Tufts breakdancing crew, and Tufts grad and recording artist Afro DZ AK (Pete Shungu, LA '03).
The organizers hope that if "Spit It" is a hit, more events like this will be planned for the future, possibly becoming more than an annual event. For a decidedly different, definitely off-beat Friday night, a Jumbo could do worse than "Spit It: A Tufts Rap Battle."
