Thursday, September 25, 2008
By Sean Corbett
www.fairfieldweekly.com
There exists a time in our history when the people who loved jazz, funk, R&B, soul, rock and punk began to rap. They were balancing on their heads, flailing their limbs, carrying boom-boxes and making drum beats with their mouths, all in the street. It was the ‘70s, it was the Bronx, and it was a distinctly American phenomenon.
Born out of a hunger for a voice, it was an art form for the oppressed made up of anger, activism, love, relief, rhythms, syllables, graffiti and vinyl—not violence, drugs and bling.
Fast forward 30 years and turn on the radio or walk into a mall. Commercial rap has clouded hip-hop to the point where grassroots groups, local crews and underground indie MCs are the genre’s only hope.
It’s for this reason that people have been turning to the D_Cyphernauts, a duo made up of two Stamford high school teachers named Dave Wooley (aka Othello) and Joe Celcis (aka Nemesis Alpha). They’re a part of the Ant Farm Affiliates, a Connecticut hip-hop crew, and they’re determined to act as worker ants to keep the queen—or in this case, hip-hop— alive.
The D_Cyphernauts are right alongside Sketch tha Cataclysm (the Weekly’s best hip-hop winner in ’08), Rising Sun Quest and Phenetiks (Weekly’s best hip-hop,’07) in terms of quality beats, lyrics and notoriety.
What further distinguishes these men is Enter the Cypher, a local hip-hop fundraiser/showcase/open mic party they started three years ago at Cousin Larry’s in Danbury. Their last show was a benefit for the Big Chief Big Queen Book Project, a literacy program in Treme, New Orleans.
“With this show, we want to change the parameters of what the expectation level is for hip-hop,” says Othello.
Nemesis Alpha, elaborated, “This is a safe place where people can get a better understanding of hip-hop so they’re not so quick to pass judgment on what’s actually an entire culture.”
Meeting with the D_Cyphernauts during their shared free period at West Hill High School, the men talked about struggling to find their voices as teachers in the Bronx even though they felt they were each born to be teachers.
Some of their students and coworkers only know them as teachers, but even in casual conversation, hip-hip is in the way they hold themselves, the way they feed off each other and the way they casually string words together as if every sentence has a beat. They feel the heartbeat of hip-hop and they’re constantly keeping it pumping.
“Since we work together, we can sit down in the same place and write together,” says Othello.
Nemesis started to explain their song-writing process, and he freestyles an explanation too good to paraphrase:
“It can be comedic, it can be socially deep, it can be personal. If we feel the need to say something, we write a verse. We share it and then the other person rides off that. Or it can be hearing a beat. Like, oh, that beat sounds good. How am I going to get on that beat? What do I hear on this beat?
“A lot of the time, one of our [AFA] producers will be like, here’s this beat, what can you do with it? It almost becomes a challenge, like a riddle. It’s like a Rubik’s cube, an open palette. Sometimes you won’t have a song or concept in your head, but the beat will create emotions in your mind, like, I’m feelin’ angry, or I’m feelin’ romantic, and the beat starts talking through you. It’s almost like the beat has a voice. That’s one thing about Ant Farm. It’s not just MCs, we have incredible producers. You can spit all you want, but if you don’t have the beats to create that sound, you’re done.”
Despite the commercial bastardization of hip-hop, Nemesis and Othello are quick to point out some mainstream rappers who are doing it right—Atmosphere, People Under the Stairs, Common, Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Immortal Technique—but they know most people get dosed with what’s most readily accessible.
“If you’re just getting Jay Z and ‘Lil Wayne, it’s like an iceberg,” Othello says. “You see that, but you’re missing all this other stuff that’s underneath, which is the foundation of what you’re hearing.”
The history of D_Cyphernauts starts with Nemesis’ close-call with mainstream success. He got “the call” from Arista Records in ‘98, and he and partner Snare were asked to lay down some rhymes for a track from a new female artist, which they were told was about money. The experience seemed like it would be what they’d hoped it would be; they were recording in a Manhattan studio. But lyrical conflicts arose—they wrote about the lessons of slavery and she wrote about stripping for money—and Arista decided not to use their lyrics.
“We were really disheartened,” Nemesis says. “It really kind of put the kibosh on us wanting to be rappers. We’d been going downtown, to little clubs and freestyling. We’d done stuff with Mr. Cheeks, and I’d established myself as a battle MC and a freestyler. But this kind of slowed all that down.”
Meanwhile, Othello was getting back into the world of hip hop, which he’d left after college to pursue teaching, and he was working with a crew at New Sound Beats, a recording studio that had been promised a Terror Squad production deal by rap hero Big Pun.
“That was the battery in our back,” Othello said, “And when Pun passed, that deal fell through.”
Luckily, this is the last point in their story that’s a bummer. Earlier, while working at NSB as a computer technician, Nemesis Alpha was challenged by one of the studio’s regulars to a freestyle battle.
“I ripped him apart,” Nemesis said. “They had no idea that I could do that. I mean I really took him apart. He was all like, ‘Yo I stack paper!’ and I come out with ‘Revolutions of contortions/When I come through with proportions/When my anti-matter makes your bladder splatter/Oh, my God.’”
Othello was there to witness, and the two crossed paths enough after that to know their styles matched up. They were both intelligent, aware rappers with a control over lyrics that many lacked. But it wasn’t until they met again as teachers of the same classroom in the Bronx, in 2000, that they knew it was time to join forces and stay together.
After five years of practice as a New York group, they “migrated to Danbury,” set up shop at Cousin Larry’s and got in with artists like Workforce and Cee Reed. In ‘06, Sketch asked them to join the Rise of the Nomads Tour and the success of that tour led directly to the formation of AFA, the like-minded crew of CT rappers.
“There was this idea,” Nemesis explains, “that this can be a scene that’ll be supported by people.”
And it has been. The third anniversary of Enter the Cypher, last Friday crammed upwards of 70 people into the small club, and almost $300 was put to good, charitable use. Friday at Larry’s was a beautiful thing; young people, old people, a mix of races, some friendly moshing, supportive screams after every rhyme, and an amoebic shifting of about 20 performers sharing the stage—including WarrenWaxx, Expertiz, DJ Halo, Workforce, Dirt E. Dutch, Protege, Sketch and a reunion of Nemesis and his old partner Snare.
“What we have done as a group is really sacrifice quick success to maintain our integrity,” Nemesis says. “A lot of decisions we’ve made aren’t necessarily good for the D_Cyphernauts, but great for the movement. Great for creating a scene, great for encouraging other artists to come out.”
They hear the commercial saturation on the radio, on TV, and they’re peacefully fighting back so that real hip-hop can make a stand.
“I look at people like Lil Wayne, Young Jeezy or Cam'ron,” Nemesis says, “and I really feel that they are not only doing a disservice to the young people who listen to hip hop, they’re ruining it. They’re destroying it. And then they’re wearing these t-shirts that say ‘I Am Hip-Hop.’ It’s intolerable to me. It infuriates me. It’s these kinds of rappers that make people say, if you don’t respect yourself, your heritage, then why should I respect you? And then they look at [‘Lil Wayne], and they see Obama, and they’re like, ‘Arent you guys from the same group?’”
He takes a breath.
“I feel like hip hop is a dying art,” he says. “We don’t have time to let people turn it into the new disco, to do with it what people did to salsa or to jazz. This is a distinctly American art form that’s slowly being destroyed. We’re trying to be a part of the solution.”
