Photos by Matt O Instagram.com/BoardinOgilvie

Last night (6-15-16) was a very special night for me personally. It was about a year ago when I had the idea of The Rap Ritual but I didn't have a name, location, and network to create it. Since then I have been going to three events a week, taking notes, and networking with artists throughout New York City. The Rap Ritual is an artist development event series that is focused on keeping hip hop culture alive. Each event is broken into 4 portions. The first is a freestyle cypher that any artist in attendance can step into and spit. The second is an open mic that any artist can sign up for and perform two songs. The third portion will change each event but for the first we filmed two cyphers to be put out on Youtube. The last and final portion of the show will feature two artists. The goal of The Rap Ritual is to give artists the opportunity to practice their craft in a positive environment. There are a lot of promoters and events that take advantage of artists by making them pay or sell tickets to perform. We are NOT one of them. Yes there is a cover but we try to keep it as cheap as possible because we do have costs like the venue, DJ, film crew, etc. As you can see below, we make sure to take pictures of every artist that hits the stage so they can share them with their fans. I think my favorite part of the entire night was the freestyle cypher. DJ Slice was dropping dope beats and the artists who jumped in dropped nothing but bars. We are currently working on setting up The Rap Ritual for July so stay tuned for the date and location following us on social media.

Facebook.com/TheRapRitual | Twitter.com/TheRapRitual