Classroom Cyphers: Remixing the Five Elements for Education and Liberation (Part One)

Prologue: The Fifth Element is You

Mind is a vital force,

high level right across

Soul is the lion's roar,

voice is the siren I swing round,

ring out,

and bring down the tyrant.

- Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), “Auditorium” (2023)

Note: This series is rooted in the work of Hip Hop cultural originators, educators, and scholars who have long carried this knowledge forward.

A dedicated section on resources, materials, and voices to deepen understanding of Hip Hop’s history and culture will be included in our next publication in this series.

I was twelve years old, a racialized girl in a city that didn’t have a box for me, so I made my own shape. Too quiet for the loud kids, too unpredictable for the scene kids, and even the indie‑alt‑thrift‑store‑mixtape‑making white kids didn’t quite know where to place me. I wanted to go to the school dances, to be there when the circle opened up and something electric happened, but mostly I lingered at the edges, chilling until it was time. Whenever one of my guy friends would ask me to slow dance, I’d agree…and then immediately panic when their hands crept a little or they leaned in like a kiss was the natural next step. I was the queen of the backbend escape — all wide‑eyed panic and dramatic limbo moves — bending away like, “Nope. Abort mission. I am absolutely not ready for whatever being-a-teenager is supposed to be.”

I started breakdancing because it gave me a reason to be at the dances without getting caught up in the slow-dance politics or the drama swirling around who was paired with whom. While preteen sweethearts sorted out their unspoken issues and the hoop earrings and butterfly clips were taken off in the girl’s bathroom to throw down before the adult supervisors could break up the fight, I was in the middle of the room, moving in my own rhythm, no need to decode any social puzzles I wasn’t ready for yet. It felt good to have a purpose, to be part of the moment without the pressure of fitting into someone else’s story.

Now, almost forty, I’m still clueless about most social rules and probably always will be; yet, the rhythm of doing you and standing your ground without asking for permission, carving space where there wasn’t any before, turning tension into flow, breaking the silence with your own language of movement, and giving gravity the finger while making the impossible look easy? 

Hey, that’s the circle that still feels like home.

To be a young girl is to carry worlds inside you no one asked to see. It is to walk through days measured by silence, by the unspoken rules of who you should be: quiet, small, contained. To learn early that your worth is often weighed in how well you disappear or fit external expectations or fantasies, in how much you bend without breaking. For every girl out there, rooted deeply beneath that surface, there is a fierce, unyielding pulse and a rhythm waiting to be heard.

Hip hop (interconnected with Soul, R&B, Funk, Blues, Jazz, and Disco) gifted me that rhythm. It gave me a constellation of voices that refused to shrink or soften.

Jill Scott taught me that tenderness could hold power and that to speak your truth with grace and vulnerability is a radical act of strength.

Erykah Badu carried wisdom in her voice, a steady fire that held space for complexity, for the sacred and the human intertwined.

Lauryn Hill showed me the courage to stand unwavering in your truth, to carry both softness and steel, scholar and warrior, all at once.

Mary J. Blige’s songs were testimonies of survival, of transforming pain into unshakable confidence. 

And then there was Missy Elliott: a force of nature who shattered every ceiling without asking for permission. She redefined what it meant to be a woman in hip hop, wielding creativity like a superpower bending sound, space, and style into a whole new language. Missy didn’t just rewrite the rules; she obliterated the playbook, making room for joy, for absurdity, for brilliance that couldn’t be boxed or tamed. Her music was futuristic and grounded, her presence magnetic and unapologetic. As I was growing into a woman, Missy provided the proof that power could be inventive, playful, and utterly revolutionary all at once.

There was MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Jean Grae, Lady of Rage, Yo-Yo, Bahamadia, Ladybug Mecca, Sha-Rock, Lil’ Kim, Eve, MC Trouble, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Da Brat, Roxanne Shante, Trina, Monie Love, Salt-N-Pepa…These women did not simply make music; they forged legacies. Their voices became maps for me, not as directions to fit in but invitations to rise, to own every part of myself, unapologetically and without compromise.

My entry into hip hop wasn’t glamorous. There were no dance studios with flashing lights or Instagram tutorials. Instead, I was that kid glued to the TV, taping breakdancers off late-night music shows and awards nights, rewinding and fast-forwarding VHS tapes just to catch a glimpse of a popper’s slide or a locker’s wave. I became a master of patience, waiting for those rare music videos that even bothered to show breakers, lurking for the moment the spotlight would hit the right move.

This was the age of Angelfire websites and dial-up patience. Tutorials for breakin’ were typed out in shaky paragraphs on anonymous forums: no videos, just words. I printed them, taped them to my bedroom mirror, and bruised my knees on cold tile floors, chasing a shape my body didn’t yet understand. 

Then one day, my first stall held. 

Just for a breath. 

In that breath, I understood something my twelve‑year‑old self didn’t have language for:

Control. 

Power. 

Flight.

Soon, grainy Rock Steady Crew clips became my scripture, each spin and freeze a line I memorized. When I discovered one of my brother’s friends was a b-girl, I begged her to teach me. That summer, in a nearly empty studio with worn floors and faded mirrors, she gave me more than moves — she handed down a code: why style was everything, why biting was a betrayal, why every spin wasn’t just a step but an introduction to who you were. “Make it yours,” she told me, and those words echoed long after the music stopped.

Later, I found a flyer for a crew that practiced in the basement of the university. We’d meet on soft linoleum floors, swapping beats, sharing stories, and trading the kind of hope that only surfaces when you realize you’re not alone. I was the youngest kid hanging with a group of twenty-something guys, fearless enough to throw down moves that made them completely lose their minds. One night, I attempted a headspin, but my head slipped, and somehow I ended up stalled on the side of my neck. The room exploded! They were yelling, running around, and flipping out like someone had just dropped the bass for the first time. I probably blacked out for a second but managed to play it cool, acting like it was part of the plan, even though I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just broken my neck.

When the feeling came back into my legs and my vision corrected, I knew that circle was where I belonged.

Soon after that moment, I had a new name: Jaqi Iraqi, “Hussein in the Membrane.” It was my way of owning my identity on my own terms, right as the Iraq War was kicking off and anti-Iraqi sentiment was on the rise, a little fearless, a little defiant, and entirely my own. The racism I faced because of my roots was raw and undeniable. Hip hop became my refuge: a place where my story, my name, and my moves were not only accepted but celebrated. That name was a declaration wrapped in rhythm, a quiet rebellion in a world trying to define me. Fierce and funny, serious and sweet, a beat of resistance with a knowing smile. Looking back and reflecting on that name now, I see a young kid trying to navigate the complexities of a political climate that was already hostile to anyone who looked like me, leaning into ironic humour as armour and a claim to space where the world tried to make me small; a young mind rationalizing that it was better to be a “joke” than a “threat,” the latter a path of isolation, the former a way to find community at a time when dignity felt aspirational. It was playful, yes, but it was also survival and self-assertion wrapped up in rhyme and bravado: the early, messy lessons of owning your story before the world gives you permission.

Before long, I was performing, traveling, working alongside artists I once studied like legends, and coaching the next generation of kids hungry to find their own rhythm in the world.

At fifteen, the turntables became my world and a new place within hip hop where time twisted and every sound was a story waiting to be told. Records spun beneath my fingers like living things, their crackles and pops weaving history into the present. I found magic in mixing Al Green’s soulful warmth with OutKast’s daring lyricism, stitching Chaka Khan’s fire to Missy Elliott’s fearless innovation.

DJing isn’t just playing tracks; it’s an act of creation and a delicate balance of precision and intuition. The scratch is a conversation, a teasing whisper coaxing a hidden groove to the surface, where loops stretch moments into eternity and crossfades blur edges, transforming separate songs into a seamless journey.

It’s in the timing: the breath held before a beat drops, the subtle shift that lifts a room into movement, the deep pulse that threads through bodies and hearts alike. Every silence, every rise, every fall is charged with possibility. The turntables become an instrument of power and poetry, a space where past and future collide, and sound becomes an unstoppable force of freedom and transformation.

This is where control and chaos meet and where music becomes a language, a ritual, and a declaration.

The DJ doesn’t simply spin records; they rewrite reality, beat by beat.

The DJ is the heartbeat of the room, the unseen conductor who reads the energy, lifts the spirits, and keeps the community alive. From the earliest block parties in the South Bronx, where DJs spun records on street corners with electricity siphoned from streetlights and turned gatherings into movements, to every beat dropped today, the DJ holds the power to unite, to heal, and to inspire.

That role is celebrated in countless songs because it is sacred: the DJ shapes the space, carries the history, and invites us all to move together as one living, breathing rhythm that never fades.

Graffiti came next: the outlaw cousin of calligraphy, a flicker of wild colour against the city’s sterile grey. It was a declaration in spaces built to mute us, a hand‑scrawled manifesto on walls that belonged to everyone and no one. In a world where our stories were missing from textbooks and our names mispronounced or forgotten, graffiti carved them loud and permanent into the landscape.

The first time I picked up a spray can, my heart pounded like I was holding lightning. The hiss of paint was louder than my breath, the smell sharp and sweet and dangerous. Every line was a gamble; an act of being seen and staying invisible all at once.

Running away after, laughing breathless in the night, felt like flying.

To see a tag on a train gliding out of the station was to witness freedom in motion, a name hurtling across borders, belonging to the streets instead of the systems that tried to contain them. To catch that same mark in another city was to know you were part of something bigger than yourself: a lineage of writers who turned blank walls into living archives of defiance.

Graffiti is anonymity and immortality in the same stroke. It carries the energy of its origins: kids in 1970s New York claiming the city as their gallery, etching their existence into spaces designed to erase them.

It still whispers that same ungovernable truth: I’m here. We’re here. You can’t erase this. 

In that moment, with your heart racing and your hands trembling and the paint still drying, you understand: you’ve written yourself into the story.

And once you’re in the story, you don’t simply exist.

You endure.

Hip hop gave me more than steps, more than beats, more than paint on a wall. It gave me a way of being. I learned swagger before I had the words for self-love. I learned how to hold my head high and walk into a room like I belonged even when everything around me whispered that I did not. It taught me to be loud when the world wanted me quiet. It showed me how to find joy in the cracks where none was meant to grow. It taught me to build family in places no one thought family could exist: in basements heavy with sweat and possibility, underpasses alive with laughter and bass, on blank walls reborn in colour and defiance.

Hip hop did not just teach me how to move. 

It taught me how to stay. 

How to hold my ground. 

How to transform struggle into rhythm and rhythm into freedom. 

That freedom still hums beneath my skin. It moves with me through every room I enter, steady and unshakable, holding me upright when the world tries to drag me down. Hip hop was never just music. It was a mirror reflecting the streets and souls of the people who made it, the originators who carved it out of broken concrete and relentless hope. It was a megaphone for voices too long silenced, a survival strategy born in basements, on stoops, beneath streetlights where every beat was a heartbeat, every rhyme a lifeline.

Hip hop is the rainbow arching over struggle, the pot of gold found not at the end but in the journey; in the scratch of vinyl, the burst of colour on a train, the flip of a breaker defying gravity. It led me to myself. It showed me how to carry the weight of history while walking light with joy. It gave me a language for my spirit and a community that demanded I be whole. It taught me how to stand fierce and free, how to build family where there was none, and how to turn resistance into rhythm.

And through all of that, hip hop carried me forward into becoming an educator and someone who believes in the power of story, in the strength of culture, in the promise of every young voice waiting for its turn on the mic. To the originators, the keepers of the streets, the souls who gave us this living, breathing art: I am endlessly grateful. Hip hop is home, and through it, I found my way back to myself and to the work I was meant to do.

This is for the streets that birthed the beats: the Black, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican youth and communities of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and beyond. For the b-boys and b-girls who broke the ground, the DJs and MCs who set the sound, the first to tag and the last to back down, the voices that sparked the fire and the souls who have kept it blazing.

Much love and respect to the legends who keep the culture spinning, the true architects of rhythm. To those who built the blocks and rocked the spots, who spoke the truth and moved the bodies, who painted the walls and spun the sounds: you are the pulse that never stops and the ones who ignited the spark and carried the flame that blazed the way for all who have come after you.

This one’s for you.

In the immortal words of Eric B. & Rakim: “Let the rhythm hit ‘em.”

On and on, the beat don’t stop ‘til the break of dawn,

- Ms. K

This is the first part of our new journey: “Classroom Cyphers: Remixing the Five Elements for Education and Liberation.”

Come back for the next spin soon!