How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

In 1998, Laymon was in the basement restroom of Mudd Library at Oberlin College asking himself what a cipher was. He had first heard the word in a Central Mississippi restroom back in 1992. He and six other boys used their lunch period to hang out in what they had designated the B-Boy bathroom. B. Dazzle, the younger brother of the emcee Kamikaze, presided. Laymon provided the beat box while B. Dazzle rhymed. No Black girls, Asians, or white people were allowed in the B-Boy bathroom while they rhymed. For the Black girls, however, the B-Boys would open the door just enough to allow them to hear. Their cipher, B. Dazzle told Laymon, was off limits to anyone not in their group. One’s worth within the group depended on how New York one sounded. Laymon had some credibility there, due to the summers he spent in upstate New York visiting his father. To Black people in Mississippi, all of New York state meant New York City.

B. Dazzle told the group that they should define their sound as “hip-hop,” not “rap.” Their group was a “cipher,” not a “rap circle.” Hip-hop was about lyricizing and dropping knowledge. Rap was a local, more country-sounding thing. All the group knew about New York hip-hop, though, was what they heard on Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City. There was also the time the Fresh Fest came to town and KRS-ONE played at Jackson State. After the emergence of the West Coast sound, which had roots in the Black Belt, they decided to stop “exclusively eavesdropping on the rhymes coming out of New York City” (121). B. Dazzle, on the other hand, was still committed to the New York sound.

Back at Oberlin in 1998, Laymon’s friend Rich Santiago asked if he and D. Jakes should call their new hip-hop magazine Tha Cypher. “Cipher” sounded inauthentic to Laymon, like “Michael Jackson’s chin, Vanilla Ice’s fade, [or] Soul Train post-Don Cornelius” (124). That year, though, the South had “completely accepted its dirtiness” (124). Albums from Master P and No Limit were going platinum and gold. The Calio [sic] Projects in New Orleans had discovered hip-hop. Santiago and D. Jakes were still trying to mimic New York City hip-hop while the rest of the Midwest was listening to Southern hip-hop. What the Southern artists understood was that imitation of New York hip-hop was pointless “without applying that imitation and interrogation to one’s local culture, one’s place” (125).

In 2013, Laymon was standing in a restroom at Vassar College. In five years, he had sold two books inspired by blues and hip-hop that hadn’t yet been published. By then, Southern artists were “[selling] millions more albums” and got more radio play (125). New York artists, meanwhile, were starting to sound more Southern.

Laymon acknowledges the great debt that Southern hip-hop owes to New York, which gave them the “means to boast, critique, and confess [themselves]” (127). The “cipher” bothered him, however, because it meant that he and others needed artistic acceptance from New York City. The art of those not from New York, including Big K.R.I.T., Margaret Walker Alexander, Cassandra Wilson, Charlie Braxton, and Richard Wright, helped him realize that he didn’t need to worry that his work would be insignificant if it didn’t mesh with New York sensibilities. He has also accepted that hip-hop has yet to show respect to Black women and girls, to “[mediate] the space between the urban and the rural, the gaps between poverty and working poor, [and] the difference between new money and wealth” (127). It has done a better job than contemporary literature, punditry, TV shows, and movies at illuminating these relationships, but it hasn’t gone far enough.

Hip-hop has grown so much bigger than New York. The new sounds that have come out of New York ciphers have forced New York and the rest of the country to pay attention, “even if they still don’t fully respect or understand from whence we come” (128).