What is hiphop to you? Is it music? A style? A community? Can it be all these things?
When hiphop is mentioned in this city it is rarely outside the context of our music scene. Hiphop is a lot more than just music but since it’s explosion into pop culture we’ve seen each aspect of the movement become compartmentalized and isolated. The breakdancers don’t know the emcees, the DJs don’t know the graffiti writers. There is no cohesion within the culture for Vancouver right now and it’s keeping us from realizing our potential.
The Freestyle Rap Alliance is a group run by local emcee Rupert Common and B-Girl J-Kay. Once a month they are throwing small events in the city that aim to assemble crowds from each corner of hiphop in Vancouver. I went to the last one and saw something special. Workshops on dancing, freestyle rapping, live music, good times and an atmosphere that’s very rarely seen around here. Normally these fractured communities would have no chance to meet but if you shove everyone in a room with some turntables and a mic, suddenly we remember what it is we all have in common… our love of hiphop.
I talked with Rupert after the freestyle workshop to pick his brain about this project…
Q: What is the Freestyle Rap Alliance?
R: FRA is two things at once, it’s a monthly community based hip-hop event that is open for everybody to come, we have workshops in rap and in dance. We share food, there’s spontaneous cyphering. The whole point was to get more people on the mic, more variety of voices on the mic and have more rappers using live beats and have more dancers with the rappers. Often these two communities don’t know each other very well. In Vancouver people specialize, so one of the main reasons we started FRA was unity. The other part of FRA is a live hiphop collective, composed of beatboxers, mcs, vocalists, musicians and dancers who do performances.
Q: What is the objective of FRA? What would you like to this to grow into?
R: A really amazing day long, two day long, organic hiphop festival, that is very accessible/free, breakers, dancers, poetry, live music, basically the expansion of FRA over the course of a day. A really awesome music festival that’s hiphop oriented, including the roots of hiphop like jazz or anything related to hiphop.
Q: What is it about Freestyle? Why is it the ‘Freestyle’ Rap Alliance?
R: It was the first thing that got me into hiphop. Freestyle Rap Alliance originated as a freestyle rap workshop, just with regular people, I co-host with a female emcee (J-Kay). So we had this female friendly cypher and then it grew and became something more but the name stuck. It’s a misnomer, people might think it’s just freestyle but it’s not. Improvisation is at the heart of all art. The more you freestyle the more it strengthens your writing. It’s at the heart of jazz, of dancing, we could really be called improvisational hiphop alliance (laughs).
Q: Why put an importance on bringing the different elements together at all?
R: Everyone has different skill sets, we all have a love for hiphop. The most hardcore rapper here today, he’s got tattoos and an aggressive way of rapping but you should see the smile on his face when he was watching the dance workshop, he loves it too. We all get caught up in whats the norm even in each subculture. Bringing everyone together is better, why would you want to isolate them? We’re better together.
Q: If someone wanted to check it out where could they follow you
R: They can check our fb, urban ink, Collingwood neighborhood house and we’re working on a website.”
If you’re interested in coming to the next event here is the fb event page