Episode 21: Johnny Cypher - Hip-Hop and Hope
Glasgow rapper, activist and educator John Spence aka Johnny Cypher joins us for a conversation about activism, theory and music
For Episode 21, I sat down with rapper, activist and educator John Spence, aka Johnny Cypher. An outspoken and passionate advocate for a human rights-led, equality-driven approach to climate activism, he played an instrumental role in the demonstrations in Glasgow around COP26 in 2021.
Johnny uses philosophical and political texts in innovative ways in his classroom work, helping people express themselves politically through the medium of hip-hop. We’re old mates, so this was a brilliant conversation, recorded live in a Glasgow pub garden on the last sunny afternoon of September. If you’d like to listen to some of Johnny’s music before you stream the episode, visit his Youtube channel to hear a few proper belters.
Reading recommendations from Johnny Cypher
Here are a few of the books, thinkers and ideas Johnny and I mention over the course of our conversation. Johnny kicks off by mentioning the track that made the connection for him between hip-hop and radical politics, namely Lowkey’s seminal track Terrorist? (which won’t embed here due to content restrictions). We spend quite a bit of time talking about Murray Bookchin, the anarchist thinker who Johnny says has influenced him the most. The Anarchist Library has a copy of Bookchin’s magnum opus Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
Friend of the pod Darren McGarvey’s award-winning Poverty Safari and the follow up, The Social Distance Between Us are two of the books Johnny uses in the classroom as inspiration for budding rap writers who want to embody a message, or find a language through which to articulate their politics. Other authors he uses include Naomi Klein, whose 90s/00s anti-capitalist classics No Logo and The Shock Doctrine are still well worth reading today (as is her latest, the absolutely riveting Doppelganger, which deserves its own post here).
Johnny also uses the work of Noam Chomsky, and while it does seem reductive of me to pick just a few of his books to recommend, On Palestine and On Anarchism both seem like apt candidates. Here’s a classic Chomsky clip, as he is asked to define anarchism.
Johnny goes on to briefly mention the feminist scholar Amia Srinivasan, whose The Right To Sex is near the top of my to-read pile. Finally, Johnny mentions Paulo Gerbaudo, and his excellent book on post-pandemic politics, The Great Recoil.
Johnny talks about getting early inspiration from the conspiracy-lite film series Zeitgeist, which caused a sensation online in 2007 (and spawned several follow-ups). While these movies may not have dated as well as Klein or Chomsky’s books, they led Johnny to the work of Jacques Fresco, and his Venus Project, based around the idea of a ‘resource-based economy’.
He also talks about the idea of ‘toolboxes’ for a different or better world, citing the ideas of Terence McKenna and Alexander Shulgin about psychedelic research, and how we’ve only recently returned to thinking and talking about their ideas in the mainstream. We talked a little about degrowth and effective altruism. There’s a very good article about the EA movement’s intellectual founder William MacAskill in The New Yorker. Srinivasan pops up here too, as a critic of EA and MacAskill generally, and ‘longtermism’ in particular, via a deliciously scathing (but fair) review for LRB.
I also mention Jem Bendell (his Deep Adaptation was an influential book on climate change back in 2017, the follow-up Breaking Together looks excellent too), and Arne Næss, who wrote about his concept of ‘ecosophy’ (a term he coined with help from Félix Guattari) or ‘deep ecology’ from the 1970s onwards.
Johnny mentions Novara Media founder Aaron Bastani’s thinking on ‘universal basic services’, which he outlines in a TED talk (above). I got a kick out of Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which while somewhat tongue-in-cheek in its optimism, was bold enough to swing for some pretty good-looking fences.
Stay tuned…
We’ll be back soon with news about Episode 22, and beyond. Thanks for sticking with us. Until next time, take care of each other.
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I really appreciated how positive and almost infectious Johnny is about alternatives to the status quo. he almost got me thinking that it can be possible :p