Toni Blackman’s hip-hop meditation

Toni Blackman‘s hip-hop education practice resembles music therapy as much as it does traditional music teaching, so it makes perfect sense that she would release a hip-hop meditation album. I did a remix of my favorite parts for my dissertation mixtape:

Toni argues that freestyling builds authentic confidence that comes from the soul, and that it you access to vulnerability and creativity. I’m not a rapper, but I’ve played enough jazz and other improvised music to know what she’s talking about. Improvisation might be the most valuable personal and professional skill that I possess.

I attended one of Toni’s cypher (freestyle rap) workshops at last year’s Ableton Loop summit. You can read a detailed account of it here. If you don’t know what a cypher is, read a study of one I attended. At the workshop, Toni didn’t address the technical side of rap at all. Instead, she led us through a series of exercises that were more like theater or comedy improv games, several of which didn’t even involve music. She wanted to get us feeling centered, confident, and in the moment. This included having us stand like rappers, feet apart, because a confident posture from the neck down fools you into feeling that way from the neck up.

Rap does have a technical side, like every form of musical expression. But more than most kinds of performance, your ability to freestyle depends entirely on your state of mind. When you’re playing an instrument, you can hide behind scale patterns and technique. When you’re rapping, you can’t. If you feel connected and confident, it comes through loud and clear, you can’t help but be dope. If, on the other hand, you feel nervous and self-conscious, then that comes through loud and clear too. Confidence and body-centered awareness are big growth areas for me as a musician, and as a human generally, so Toni has a lot to teach me.

I got a valuable confidence lesson during Toni’s keynote address at the 2017 NYU IMPACT Conference. As she does in all of her presentations, she concluded her talk by freestyling a verse, and she asked for a volunteer from the audience to do a beat for her. It was first thing in the morning, and no one immediately raised their hand, so I finally raised mine. I had been beatboxing in private for a few years, but I had never done it for an audience. But Toni’s Jedi master affect encourages risk-taking. I climbed up on stage and spit the Funky Drummer beat, and she conducted me in and out while she did her verse. I have felt every form of stage fright there is, but being up there felt as easy and casual as if we were just hanging out together.

I asked Toni’s permission before posting my remix, but I knew when I produced it that she’d be cool with it. This is what qualitative researchers refer to as a member check:

After a session of the TechRow hip-hop afterschool program, sometimes I walk down the street to the subway still buzzing from the kids’ freestyling (when I’m not exhausted by their rowdiness.) The past few times, I’ve found myself muttering strings of rhyming nonsense to myself, free-association mostly, sometimes profound, usually not. Maybe this is the beginning of my life as an emcee.