Cryphaholics Anonymous
Local DJs test the boundaries of hip-hop, dance and electronica at "Get Cryphy"

by Roe Pressley
photos courtesy of
artists' myspace profiles
9/4/08

Ever been in this situation?

You roll into the club with a confident strut. You’re wearing your slickest, pimpest get-up, you just got a $60 haircut, and you’re sporting those brand-new, spotless white Nike kicks. You order a drink, step onto the dance floor to get your swerve on to a familiar jam, and suddenly—what the hell is this shit?

The DJ throws down house music!

Few things can kill a dance floor like a DJ’s lack of discretion when it comes to selecting tracks. For whatever reason, there has always been somewhat of a rift between hip-hop heads and electronica—er, dance music—fans, and rarely can the contrast be seen more than in nightclubs. Really, how often do you walk into a dance club and they’ve got hip-hop, rock, and house playing back to back? It just doesn’t jive.

That is, unless you know how to Get Cryphy.

For the last year, a handful of local DJs have been transcending the perceived separation between the glitzy-glamour of house, breaks and electro and the low-down dirtiness of crunk, gangsta rap, and hyphy. And they do it well; they tend to get a more lively reaction from their audiences than most DJs from any of those styles get alone. On any given night at their regular “Get Cryphy” parties, you can hear anything from E40 to Journey, Outkast to Daft Punk—in that order, backwards, or staggering crunkly in between. And even with the style and occasional tempo changes, the DJs (and the audience) rarely miss a beat.

Plain Ole Bill and Jimmy2Times have paid enough dues to the local scene to get away with it. Bill can be found half the week manning the register at Fifth Element, the notorious one-stop hip-hop shop owned by Rhymesayers Entertainment. Jimmy makes his rounds mixing, scratching and juggling his way from gig to gig and has firmly dug his feet in as the DJ counterpart to beat-boxer/MC Carnage’s shows.

Jimmy2Times

Plain Ole Bill

But when the weekend comes, these rap mavericks shed their hip-hop civilian disguises and become the Cryphaholics, a freak-hybrid party crew whose sole purpose seems to be bitch-slapping their audiences with one of the most energetic dance parties in Minneapolis. And they never roll up alone.

"The party scene made me want to be a party rocker, but the battle videos made me want to be a battle DJ."

Technically speaking, from a dictionary standpoint, "cryphy" is a hybrid of the dirty, southern "crunk" rap music (exemplified by, you guessed it, Lil' John) and the Bay-Area-spawned "hyphy" (such as E40, Mac Dre, etc.). But in the context of Get Cryphy, the term really holds little sway; the track selection dances far beyond this classification, in both style and tempo.

DJ Jimmy2Times has made a name for himself as a battle and party DJ, but his roots are as diverse as his record collection. He grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where at the time there was only one record store in town for serious hip-hoppers. He bought his first DJ battle videos there and was instantly taken by the art form.

“We really didn’t have any kind of hip-hop scene [in Upstate New York],” he said. “There was a pretty healthy rave scene, so I could go to parties and once in a while there would be a hip-hop room or a turntablism room… and that was basically my first exposure, what made me want to start DJing. The party scene made me want to be a party rocker, but the battle videos made me want to be a battle DJ.”

Anyone who’s taken a romp through the garden of sonic delights should recognize that the fusion of electronic and rap music is really nothing new. Take the so-called “Godfather of Hip-Hop” Afrika Bambaataa, who many credit with helping rap get off the ground. His music has always crossed borders and blurred lines; this is exemplified over and over, as with Bambaataa’s collaborative track with techno gurus Leftfield on “Future Shoxx,” among others.

As for the popularity of modern club-party mash-ups of rap, house, and “dance-rock electro” (among others), it’s been building for a while in larger hubs like New York and Chicago, but has yet to fully manifest locally on a large scale.

“Minneapolis has always kind of been a little bit late on stuff like that,” Jimmy said.

In the days of yore (circa 2007), Jimmy and Bill used to host Foundation’s weekly “Party and Bull$hit” events, throwing down a mix that mostly consisted of popular rap music.

“Right before Get Cryphy, we were going through a transition with the Party and Bull$hit night,” Jimmy recalled. “We weren’t necessarily allowed to take it in the direction we wanted to.”

Though they were both hip-hop DJs at their cores, both were increasingly becoming influenced by newer styles like Baltimore club, dance-rock electro, and juke. After DJing with Chicago’s Flostradmus crew, they were turned on to myriad up-tempo, party-oriented dance music and wanted to experiment with implementing it at their own parties.

“What they were doing seemed just like another version of what Bill and I had been doing on four turntables,” he said. “But we weren’t allowed to fully explore that kind of thing until after [Foundation] closed and we started our own party—which is the beauty of it because we have complete control over it and we can do whatever we want.”

Now, with their parties in the VIP room going on monthly since March, the Cryphaholics have earned a dedicated fan base.

"It’s probably got one of the most diverse crowds in the city that I’ve seen."

“We have a really broad group of people that come to the party,” Jimmy touted. “What I’m really proud to say about Cryphy is that it’s probably got one of the most diverse crowds in the city that I’ve seen.”

Another iconic member of their crew is DJ Fundamentalist. If Jimmy and POB are borderline-insane for working Daft Punk into the mix, this guy is straight up demented: he throws down a track from Boys Noize. (For those unfamiliar, picture Daft Punk, minus most elements of cheesy disco, and five times as hard.)

The Cryphaholics DJs (from left to right): Fundamentalist, Plain Ole Bill,
Last Word, and Jimmy2Times

Jimmy met DJ Fundamentalist while doing shows with the Hecatomb crew’s Carnage and Capaciti. Soon Jimmy and Bill were bringing Fundamentalist in as a special guest at their weekly Foundation gigs. Eventually “Fundo” became a bona-fide member of the Cryphaholics, along with DJ Last Word, who rocks the weekly ladies’ night at the Dinkytowner.

Now, with their status in the club-party scene solidified, the group has time to focus on other efforts, including remixing certain beloved classics for the Get Cryphy format. A good example is Bitch Ass Darius’s reworking of Harry Bellafonte’s “Jump in the Line” (the song at the end of Beetlejuice—you know, “Shake, shake, shake, señora!”).

Jimmy says they would also like to take the Get Cryphy name on tour… some day.

“Eventually what we want to do is have a Get Cryphy tour in several cities,” he said. “I don’t want to rush anything, just ‘cause I wanna do everything correctly. But… this is definitely something that could lead to bigger and better things.”

They also regularly bring enthusiastic guest DJs to add new flares and acute styles to the Get Cryphy brand. Recent parties included performances from Bitch Ass Darius from St. Louis, and locals like the Moongoons, Mike the 2600 King, and the two-woman duo Tendercakes.

"Party music without borders."

The lineup may change, but all the artists who play at Get Cryphy exemplify the essence of the event: party music without borders. Cryphy, mash-up, club, house, dance, call it what you want. Pigeonhole it, throw it in a box for sorting, but it’s like a jack-in-the-box: it will break out of the barrier and surprise you when you least expect it. Just don’t have a heart attack when it happens.

“The U.S. as a whole is just starting to get a sense of how closely hip-hop and club music are related,” Jimmy said. “I think in Minnesota it’s a lot easier to see it divide, because the electronic scenes and the hip-hop scenes are so separated… We’re just trying to show people that it’s cool to do all of it.”

Roe Pressley

For a hilarious related article on techno's contribution to crunk music, check out Hip-Hop Embraces Techno (Yeah! O.K.!), The New York Times, November 28, 2004