This is where you’ll find a living archive of my projects, the work I’ve done with clients, and chonicles of my adventures as I change the world.
I’m a Miami-based photographer + brand strategist focused on defying the odds and telling the dopest stories for clients who are interested in doing the same.
I believe stories are the vehicles that move culture forward and there’s nothing more important today than strengthening cultural integrity across the arts, urban environments, fashion, and hospitality.
030 The Invisible Hand Behind Red Bull’s Most Popular Hip Hop Cypher
DOC 7-10-2025
Curiosity: What can we learn from the viral Red Bull Cypher? Category: Insights
BRANDS DON’T CREATE CULTURE.
People do.
For those very reasons brands are increasingly obsessed with cultural “taps” and brand-artist collabs. Few campaigns achieve true resonance with audiences and even fewer feel like they were born of the culture they seek to represent, rather than built around it. At their best, brands can recognize it, support it, and if they’re lucky, be invited into it.
The recent slate of Red Bull Spiral Freestyle Cyphers were one of those rare invitations. One of the most viral featuring Big Sean, Ab-Soul, and Joey Bada$$, three lyrical heavyweights, three distinct regions, one fluid, one-take performance that reminded everyone why cyphers still matter in Hip Hop.
With over 2 Million views on Youtube within it’s first few hours, the Spiral Freestyle Series Season 3 opener captivated Hip Hop fans, podcasters, artists, and commentators worldwide. Fresh off the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s triumphant victory over Drake in their clash of words, Hip Hop was at a fever pitch. The largest battle just occured and the demand for high quality rap was borderline insatiable. How fitting then to deliver fresh food for thought for the people from three lyricists who each own their respected narrative in the culture’s current discourse. This moment didn’t feel like it belonged to Red Bull. It felt inevitable given the climate of Hip Hop at the time, like it was bound to happen the way it did and with those individuals.
But it wasn’t inevitable. It was intentional.
That’s the part that tends to get missed in the content post-mortem reports, the social listening reports, and the engagement charts that “validate” the content. We’re in an era where every brand wants to “tap into culture” but culture isn’t a faucet. You can’t turn it on when it’s time to launch a new campaign and off again when the quarter ends.
Most brands don’t miss the mark because they lack creativity, they miss because they don’t have the right interpreters. People who live the nuance. We treat moments like this as if the all powerful “brand” managed to force lightning in the bottle when more accurately, there’s always someone behind the scenes, not pulling strings, but tuning them so the sounds played resonate and sequence with the palette of the people appropriately.
Photograph from @lyricspoetic Instagram, Photography Courtesy of Koury Angelo.
Not to be mistaken as a brand’s cultural seat filler, Perez is an Emmy Nominated creative producer and strategist who’s spent years quietly and consistently building a body of work that honors Hip Hop with reverance and special care. Perez has worked on everything from commercials, and music videos, to documentaries and docuseries. She has exective produced & co-created some of the most influential talk shows in Hip Hop while helping to produce for platforms like Complex, Revolt, MTV, VH1, and most recently, Red Bull. And if brands are serious about wanting to “show up authentically,” they should study not just the cypher and it’s impact for Red Bull, but the woman who manifested it.
“Culture is not only trendy ideas, culture is spiritual, desirable, shows up authentically unique, & speaks to the history of rich rooted places and the peoples of that place. When creating and representing culture, you must have people who are a part of that culture. People who have done their due diligence to tap into the honest history of that culture, who respects the culture, and represents it through several mediums, in great taste!” - Lyric Perez
Perez didn’t just book hyped up talent. She built chemistry. From selecting the artists to staging the shoot to crafting the dynamics between them, every beat was considered. She understood that three great rappers don’t guarantee a great cypher. It takes rhythm. Movement. Trust. Rehearsal. And someone in the room who understands that Hip Hop isn’t a manufactured monologue but instead, it’s a conversation between the artist, the audience, and the moment at large. “Anytime artists don’t mind doing the work, and they understand the assignment we discussed in pre-production, I know I have gold on my hands,” she said. “My ideas are nothing without theirs.”
One of the most defining moments of that cypher, a mid-verse interaction between Big Sean and Ab-Soul was sparked in rehearsal. “Shout out to Sean, Ab-Soul, & Joey! Together they chose to rehearse before the shoot.” Perez said. “Ab-Soul played a big role in suggesting they interact a certain way and it worked.”
Photography Courtesy of Koury Angelo.
The space it takes for a moment like this to transform into a cultural inflection point didn’t come from Red Bull’s brand guidelines, it couldn’t have. It comes from someone with a life baptized in the raw elements that make up the essence of that culture. In this case it comes from Perez’s instincts honed through a life in music, whether through singing in choirs, performing arts, or buying mixtapes on the train from stangers and growing up in NYC.
And that’s the lesson most brands still struggle to learn.
Too often, cultural initiatives are approached transactionally. Brands treat culture like a sandbox, assuming that with the right visuals and a handful of influencers, they can build something that looks the part. But culture, especially Hip-Hop, isn’t aesthetic. It’s architecture. It requires foundations. History. Trust. Personal affinity.
Too often brands look for culture in the data, in trending audio, in creator metrics but culture is something you build proximity to by hiring people who live it.
It’s not enough to partner with artists. You need people behind the camera, in the creative meetings, in the budget approvals, who know what these collaborations should feel like and not just how they should look. Perez put it plainly:
“You negotiate with leaders internally & you fight for your expression and expression of the artist you're working with. Inside the office, you must make sure you let people who may not know about the culture know what the culture looks like and how it should be expressed and represented.” - Lyric Perez
Red Bull’s history with Hip Hop, especially through its BC One breakdancing competitions definitely gave it some credibility going in. Launching in 2004, Red Bull’s BC One initially focused on breakdancing cyphers where dancers would gather in a circle and battle, expressing themselves in front of peers in classic Hip Hop fashion. Over time, the brand expanded its Hip Hop involvement to include rap cyphers in part as a response to a perceived decline in the quality and cultural relevance of other mainstream cypher platforms.
But even a legacy of success doesn’t mean much without organic taste and an ever maturing relationship with the cultures you’re creating for. That’s what Perez brought to the table. Taste, intuition, and the ability to protect the integrity of the artists while still delivering something visually striking.
This wasn’t just a performance for the sake of driving attention. With everything happening in Hip Hop at the time, this cypher became a narrative all its own. One camera. One take. One moment that didn’t feel branded until you checked the logos in the frame.
For brands looking to replicate that success, the answer isn’t more research or better mood boards. It’s trust. Trust in people like Lyric Perez. Trust in those who don’t just understand “the culture,” but who live, honor, and create within it as a living extention of its history.
What audiences responded to in that cypher was care. Real care. Care by the artists and care by the brand by way of the people who cared enough to keep the spotlight where its meant to be.
That kind of care can’t be faked, and can’t be achieved by committee.
If you want your brand to matter to people who matter to culture, start by hiring people who don’t need to rely on the zeitgeist to tell them what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with because they’re just as much the tastemaker as they are the target audience.
“I make sure I tap in to the evolution of the city and make sure I blend the OGs with the newer artists keeping authentic representation alive. And when I have an idea, God & I bring something special together; beleive it or not, some magic happens organically...Anything can happen, artists drop, can't commit, someone doesn't like the beat, but when you select the right talent, who knows how to come together to be authentically themselves AND they have great work ethic, something big always happens.” - Lyric Perez