Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Tomáš Jenčo

English Accents in Rap Music Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: PhDr., Kateřina Tomková, Ph. D.

2018

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Acknowledgement

I want to thank first of all my supervisor PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D. for her tremendous help and insight and also my family and friends for support.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Thesis Outline

1 Rap………………………………………………………………………………………....1

1.1 Definition of Rap……………………………………………………………………….1

1.2 Rap’s Cultural Origins…………………………………………………………………3

1.3 Rapping vs Singing………………………………………………………………….....9

1.4 Technical Elements of Rap…………………………………………………………...12

1.4.1 Flow……………………………………………………………………………...…12

1.4.2 Rhyme………………………………………………………………………………16

1.4.3 Rhythm……………………………………………………………………………...17

2 Speech Style Shift Theories………………………………………………………………20

2.1 Style Shift in General…………………………………………………………………27

2.2 Style Shift in Pop Music……………………………………………………………...27

3 Regional Varieties of English…………………………………………………………….32

3.1 General American……………………………………………………………..……...35

3.2 Jamaican English……………………………………………………………………...37

3.3 London Popular……………………………………………………………………….40

3.4 Northern English……………………………………………………………………...45

4 Case Study………………………………………………………………………………...46

4.1 Methodology…………………………………………………………………………..46

4.2 General American: Eminem…………………………………………………………...48

4.3 Popular London: Dabbla………………………………………………………………53

4.4 British Creole: Ocean Wisdom………………………………………………………..57 4.5 Northern English: Lee Scott…………………………………………………………...62

Conclusion

References

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Summary (English)

Summary (Czech) List of Figures and Tables

Table 1: Flow diagram………………………………………………………………………..15

Table 2: “USA-5 model” features in contrast to UK features...... 28

Table 3: Standard lexical sets...... 34

Figure 1: Vowel shift from RP to Cockney through Popular London………………………..42

Table 4: Flow diagram: the chorus of LDZ – Armoured truck riddem………………………56 1

Introduction

For several years now I have been mesmerised by rap music and, being an English major, the decision to write a thesis focusing on the behaviour of various English accents in rap came quite naturally. I have been inintentionally studying rap pronunciation long before I started writing my thesis. After first listening to a broad spectrum of American rappers, I have recently switched to predominantly British rap and related genres and was immediately struck by the major differences in pronunciation, diction and the overall sound of the British accents on beat. I have made a habit of listening to the same songs over and over again, each time uncovering a new nugget of lyrics or a word I had previously been unable to make out. This voluntary research has provided me with a wide range of anecdotal linguistic findings.

Furthermore I started thinking more about rap as the opposite form of singing. I realized that, at least in non-mainstream underground rap, which I predominantly listen to, the artists are unashamed of their own vernaculars and often actually use it to their benefit.

After having started the broad research on pronunciation in rap music I came across the work by Kateřina Dudáková about the style shift which takes place in popular music singing. Once I read the entire work the decision was clear to investigate English styles in rap as the opposite side of the imaginary musical expression coin. After a more extensive research no work which would discuss the effect of regional variations of English on the pronunciation in rap and its inherent implications for the lyrical content could be found. The decision was thus made to put my pre-acquired observations of rap pronunciation to the test using legitimate linguistic, cultural, musical and social theories.

2

Thesis Outline

As the first thing in the thesis rap will be discussed from several points of view. Firstly the term rap itself will be explained using dictionary definitons. These definitions will then be contrasted with those of singing, in order to clarify the inherent differences between the two.

After that the brief history of the origins of rap will be explained, followed by the technical aspects of rapping, mainly flow as the matrix of rhyme and rhythm. The next major chapter will concentrate on various theories which have been proposed as reasons for the style shift occuring in pop music singing and their applicability to rap will be assessed. These chapters will be directly based on the thesis by Dudáková and separated into two parts – style shift in general and style shift specifically in pop music singing. The last theoretical chapter will focus on several major regional styles of English, explaining the region in which each one is spoken and their most characteristic linguistic features. Case study will follow, in which the methodology will first be explained. In the study itself the pronunciation of several rappers coming from different geographical regions will be investigated. This will be done by first analyzing and comparing their accents in everyday speech and then while performing rap. After determining whether they retain their accents when rapping or not, with concrete evidence, further implications of these findings on the nature of the lyrical content of rap songs will be explored.

3

1 Rap

In order to be able to productively talk about anything, it is essential to first establish what exactly it is that is understood by it. Precise and unambiguous language is vital for successful communication. Therefore, as the very first thing in the thesis, the term rap needs to be explained.

1.1 Definition of Rap

The word itself can be used both as a noun and as a verb. For the most reliable and widely established definition of rap we look to major online dictionaries. The Oxford

Dictionary lists three possible meanings of the verb rap, the first one being unrelated to music and used with an object: “Strike (a hard surface) with a series of rapid audible blows, especially in order to attract attention.” The connection of this meaning to the dynamic and rhytmic sounds associated with rap seems evident and it can be argued that the music genre got its name directly from this, presumably original, meaning of the verb rap.

The second usage of the verb rap is marked as coming from informal Northern American register and being used without an object: ”Talk or chat in an easy and familiar manner,” with the provided example: “‘we could be here all night rapping about spiritualism’.” (Oxford)

The third example, once again objectless, simply states: “Perform rap music;“ ‘he raps under the name of Mr T.’ (Oxford)

Oxford also provides examples of “rap” being used as a noun, meaning firstly “a quick, sharp knock or blow,“ which is the nominalized version of the first meaning of the verb rap. Under the second meaning of the noun rap, marked as a mass noun, stands “a type of popular music of US black origin in which words are recited rapidly and rhythmically over an instrumental backing.“ (Oxford)

1

The Oxford Online Dictionary lists three more ways rap is used as a noun, making it five altogether, however the last three are irrelevant to it’s musical meaning, which we are primarily concerned with. The Cambridge Dictionary of English defines rap as

“a type of popular music with a strong rhythm in which the words are spoken, not sung.“

(Cambridge)

Both dictionaries mention that the performance of rap lyrics, i.e. rapping, is spoken, not sung,

Oxford even goes a step further calling it a recital.

The Cambridge Dictionary of English defines rap as “a type of popular music with a strong rhythm in which the words are spoken, not sung.“ (Cambridge)

The word rap in its musical sense thus contains rapping defined as a spoken,, as opposed to sung musical performance, or a recital to a musical beat, regardless of the specific genre of the beat itself and the musical genre associated with the act of rapping.

2

1.1 Rap’s Cultural Origins

In opposition to the technique or skill of rapping, rap as a musical genre employs rapping to produce a lyrical performance. The history of rap music is to a large degree intervowen with the musical genre known as hip hop and the two are sometimes interchangable.

The origins of the rap form can be traced back to Africa, with the tradition of “griots”, during which village story tellers would play basic handmade instruments while telling stories of their family and local current events. (Rattrey)

When these original Africans were taken against their will by the tens of thousands, they carried this tradition with them and adapted it to the famous “call and response“ form commonly associated with work on plantations. (Rattrey)

Another major country which influenced the birth of modern rap style was Jamaica where reggae music and sound system culture were flourishing. There is some dispute conserning the exact place, time and people who first performed rap, however the common consensus points to the boroughs with large African American communities in New York in the late

1960s and early 70s. The names most commonly associated with this time and place in history are those of DJ Kool Herc, real name Clive Campbel and Coke La Rock from Bronx and DJ

Pete Jones, and Grandmaster Flowers from Brooklyn. (Daveyd) In the early 1970s Kool Herc started throwing block parties with his sister for an entrance fee playing various records on his powerful self constructed sound system. As this initiative was gaining more popularity Herc would occasionally speak directly to the dancing crowd on the microphone alongside the record. When asked in an interview to elaborate on what he calls “calling names on the mic,“ he responds: “I was like hailing my friends that I knew out there in the party. That would keep my head going... I'd say things like, 'There goes my mellow Coke La Rock in the house.' (Daveyd)

3

These lines turned to rhymes, and when asked whether he got his rhyming style from Jamaica, he said: “Hip-Hop, the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica, cause I'm West Indian. I was born in Jamaica. I was listening to American music in Jamaica and my favorite artist was James Brown. That's who inspired me. A lot of the records I played were by James

Brown. When I came over here I just had to put it in the American style and a drum and bass.

So what I did here was go right to the ‘yoke’. I cut off all anticipation and played the beats. I'd find out where the break in the record was at and prolong it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion wise. Cause my music is all about heavy bass.“ (Daveyd)

What Herc refers to as prolonging the break was the most revolutionary innovation in the emergence of the hip-hop DJ. There is some dispute whether he or, according to Pete DJ

Jones, Grandmaster Flowers was the first to do it (Coke la Rock), the technique involved finding the passage in a record when the singing would stop and the beat would carry on for a while, which was known in slang as the break. During it the front of the dancefloor closest to the stage would usually clear to make room for dance, who started to be known as break- boys or later just b–boys.

In the late 1960s Pete “DJ” Jones would often play the same record on two turntables simultaneously, so while the break was playing on one of them, he could rewind the other and have it ready once the one on the first turntable finished, thus effectively creating a loop.

After being asked in an interview when he actually started spinning two copies of the same record and what kind of records, he says: “Well it was around 69 or 70... stuff by James

Brown, Peoples Choice...“ (Quan)

He explains his reasons for this practice: “the best part of the record is the breakdown... what guys started calling the break or breakbeat. That was the part that got people dancing... So I would play that part continuous. I had a mixer that had a cue... So that

4 you could hear the record on one turntable while the other one played. I would have 2 copies.“ (Quan)

Kool Herc, who started out as a dancer himself, explains his similar thought process behind the technique in another interview: “How the break thing happened, I was seeing everybody on the sidelines waiting for particular breaks in the records... I’m observing them. I wasn’t just a turntablist. I’m watching the crowd. If there’s a argument escalating into a fight, and who’s up in my place. I gotta see if things running smooth. I said let me put a couple of these records together, that got breaks in them. I did it. boom bom bom bom. I try to make it sound like a record. Place went berserk. Loved it.“ (Kool Herc) Herc called his version of playing the breaks on repeat “the Merry Go Round,“ (Kool Herc) and he later upgraded it so that he would be playing a string of breakbeat parts from several songs back to back.

As for the lyrical side of the hip-hop culture and actual rapping, the first DJs such as

Pete, Herc and others had the habit of talking to the crowd, as has been mentioned with Kool

Herc and his Jamaican inspired rhyming style. However, initially the roles of the DJ who would play the records and the Master of Ceremonies, whose purpose was talking to the crowd and energizing it, were synonymous and usually performed by the same person. Pete

Jones claims that the first person he ever heard rap was DJ Hollywood (Quan), however the separation of the roles had not yet come about. It appeared in the early 70s most likely with

Coke La Rock who became Herc’s partner at parties. (Mize)

Cole Mize states:

“As DJ Kool Herc continued to do more parties he realized that speaking on the mic was just as important to keeping a party live as DJing was. In order to keep up with the demands of the crowd he reached out to his good friend Coke La Rock to be the first dedicated MC of these parties. During one of these parties Coke La Rock spit his very first bar, ‘There’s not a man that can’t be thrown, not a horse that can’t be rode, a bull that can’t be stopped, there’s not a disco that I Coke La Rock can’t rock.’ This one bar made Coke La Rock the very first rapper in Hip-Hop and birthed a new genre of music we know today as Rap music.“ (Mize)

5

The use of the word disco in Coke’s bar is no coincidence, since that was the prevalent genre in the 60s and when hip-hop first appeared it was the direct opposite of disco. There was speaking instead of singing, the dances were less scripted and more open to experimentation and also the whole genre was readily available to the masses who did not need to have a lot of money, since the way they just played loops from records did not require their own production, as opposed to disco artists who had to record their songs from scratch, often in a professional studio, which made it so that disco was by design excluding towards the minorities. Coke La Rock even says in his interview for The Foundation:

“And people don’t recognize this but we killed Disco! I don’t care what anybody says... Even the great Pete D.J. Jones he was Disco... Pete controlled the Bronx with that music. But that was Disco. We came with those beats and we played what we wanted to play the same I played what I wanted to play.“ (Coke La Rock)

Regardless of the exact historical accuracy of who did what first or who stole ideas from whom, what is important are the underlying tendencies which were present in the culture. It is also perfectly plausible that Pete Jones and Herc got the idea for the looping of breaks independently from each other in the spirit of “brilliant minds tend to think alike.“

Likewise there will always be disputes about who rapped the very first bar.

After the generation of pioneers others followed in their footsteps and expanded on their ideas. New DJs were producing progressively more complex musical beats and as the

MCs started exploring the possibilities of lyrical expression to a musical beat their lyrics started getting longer and the rhyme patterns more elaborate. At a certain point the genre of rap/hip hop branched out into several new genres characterized by certain specific musical features. Most importantly there appeared a distinction between rap and hip hop as musical genres and even though the line between the two often gets blurry, in broad terms it could be said that “hip hop culture is defined by the late '70s, early '80s beat-box style of music where groups like Sugarhill Gang, Fab 5 Freddy, and Kurtis Blow. These artists, and many more just

6 like them, sang in upbeat tones that told people to get off their seats and dance to the music.

Their message was more of a positive, brighter future type of ballad.” (Differences between ran and hip-hop)

Rap, on the other hand, is more concerned with what is going on in popular culture.

Current rap stars like Eminem, 50 Cent, and Lil' Wayne frequently rap about the prevalence of drug dealing where they are from, political issues that they disagree with, or general elements of impropriety amongst the perceived leaders of this nation.“ (Differences between rap and hip-hop)

Another way of looking at the distinction is that:

“hip-hop is a culture and rapping is one of four elements contained therein—the others being breakdancing, DJing and graffiti. Today, with the other elements not appearing as prominently as they once did, it’s been easy to conflate the two.“ (Ebony)

Other major genres arguably descended from rap/hip-hop include more energetic drum’n’bass, which was birthed in the UK and from which the massively popular dubstep subgenre developed, and more recently genres which have been enjoying growing attention, especially among the younger generations, are grime and trap. All of these genres branch out further, however for the purpose of this thesis the main ones will suffice. What all of the listed genres have in common is their suitability to serve as a background beat for a spoken, not sung vocal performances of lyrics, i.e. rapping.

7

2.3 Rapping vs Singing

So far the discussion has been held only about what rap is and how it started as a cultural phenomenon. Now the rap form will be compared with that of singing, since one of the definitions of rap explicitly states it is “a spoken, not sung performance“ (Oxford), which seems to indicate that the two could possibly be in opposition to each other.

The Oxford Dictionary‘s number one definition of the verb “sing“ is: “Make musical sounds with the voice, especially words with a set tune.“ The second listed usage of sing means to “make a high-pitched whistling or buzzing sound.“ (Oxford) It is often said of a tune that it is being carried, however that is just another way of saying ‘holding a tone’, which is the technique of making certain, mostly vowel sounds last longer while often also changing the pitch of the voice in the duration of the said tune or tone, which are in this context interchangable. The pitch does not always have to be high. Many, mostly (but not exclusively), male singers have used use their deep bar voices to carry a tune in a unique and distinctive way. Nevertheless the way the pitch of the voice is being manipulated and sometimes even exploited when singing usually does not seem to follow regular speech patterns, namely stress and pronunciation in particular, quite to the contrary the whole purpose of the singing form appears to be being as distinct from regular speech as possible.

In traditional rapping there is no carrying of tunes to the extent of being classified as singing.

There are admittedly some more mainstream crossover rappers who often sing in their choruses, however in the very least the verses in the songs are rapped most of the time.

The pitch changing is also virtually non - existent in rap in the sense it is done in singing. Whatsmore, since rapping is essentially rhytmical recital to a beat, the regular speech patterns often get amplified by the beat, most notably when a rapper makes the stressed syllables match the individual beats and thus stand out even more. This is often accompanied by the exaggeration of certain specific pronunciation features of a word. The ability of rappers

8 to maintain hitting stressed syllables where the individual beats of the music are for an extended period of time in a rhythmical way is known as flow, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

As opposed to singing, in which the pronunciation of words is frequently distorted, the way rappers make sure their audience knows what they are saying is by amplifying the characteristic features of noises. This is most notable in consonants, for example plosives are pronounced with added explosivity, fricatives with more friction than usual and so on. It is likely from this overaccentuation of certain noises (plosives in particular) where the term

‘spitting’ comes from as a slang for rapping; because when rapping properly, the rapper would actually be spitting to a certain degree when pronouncing plosive consonants due to an aggressive and uncontrolled release of pulmonic pressure necessary to produce those noises.

Spit serves as its own example of a word which would be pronounced excessively plosively in a rap verse.

All of these factors make rapping somewhat of an ‘extreme speech’. The nature of rapping makes it so that typical features of sounds are manifested even more audibly than in regular speech. An analogy for the comparison of rapping to singing can be effectively explaine on that of walking and running. If everyday speech is walking, singing is running.

Rap in this analogy would be the Olympic discipline called race walking. The main difference between walking and running is that walking, no matter how fast, uses steps, whereas running is performed in strides. During a stride both feet lose contact with the ground which is prohibited in race walking, during which one foot has to be in contact with the ground at all times. Within these confines the race walker is free to walk as fast as their legs allow them.

Similarly in rap, the artist is free to significantly alter his or her voice as long as they do not switch into full blown singing, meaning drawing out vocals or altering the voice pitch. Their

9 metaphorical one foot on the ground at all times is thus keeping a spoken cadence to their voice without prolonging vocals or significantly changing the pitch of one’s voice.

It needs to be noted, that there are many songs which fall on various points of the singing-rapping spectrum, for example many rap or hip-hop songs have sung choruses but rapped verses, so there is a significant degree of mixing of the genres, however the examples which will be used in the case study were carefully selected to contain rapping only.

10

2.4 Technical Elements of Rap

The following chapter focuses on flow and its two components rhyme and rhythm as the fundamental core principles which all rap music has in common.

2.4.1 Flow

Author Paul Edwards in his unique work in two volumes called How to Rap collaborates with numerous famous rappers to get their insights into every thinkable element of rapping. The first volume is divided up into three chapters, the first one focusing on lyrical content with three chapters talking in detail about content topics, content forms and content tools. Although highly insightful, these chapters are phonologically unappealing. For that reason the author will skip straight to the second part, which is about flow with specific chapters on flow itself, but also rhyme and rhythm.

In the introduction to flow Edwards writes:

“The flow of a hip-hop song is simply the rhythms and rhymes it contains. For some MCs, this defines rapping as the next stage in poetry. But rap is not just poetry spoken aloud, because unlike the rhythm of a poem, a song’s flow has to be in time with the music—the rhythm of the lyrics must fit with the basic rhythm of the music. This basic rhythm is referred to as the beat, and the same term is often used as another name for the music itself.“ (Edwards, 1982, 63) Flow is exclusive to the rap form and does not appear in singing, which is, in fact, known to pride itself in its divergence from the stress and pronunciation patterns of everyday speech, which is why pop, rock, or other genres centered around the singing performance are not very suitable for learning English pronunciation, as Kateřina Sedláková explored in her thesis entitled Suprasegmental Features in Czech Speakers of English. In it she concluded, albeit on a limited sample of students, that some young students who listened mostly to rap music had better instincts about pronunciation than the fans of pop and rock music styles:

“Research has shown that there is a tendency in rap listeners to perceive stress more readily

11 and to use them in their speech and reading. Sometimes it seems to be purely subliminal, though.“ (Sedláková, 2017, 59)

Flow is what in the opinions of many rappers makes rap an art form. The apparent handicap of only performing in a regular speaking tone of voice instead of singing demands another way of enhancing the utterance. In Edwards‘s book several rappers give their insights on the importance of flow, rapper MURS says:

“Not only do you have to make everything rhyme, but you have to add a rhythm to it. Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, it just has to sound beautiful, but in rap it has to sound beautiful and it has to be on time and it has to rhyme, so to me it’s the next level of poetry evolution.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 63) Sean Price of the rap group Heltah Skeltah confirms the notion of the need to find something artistic in the rap form in this way:

“It’s down to attaching flow to the beat… Like Bruce Lee said, if the water is in the jug, it becomes that jug. If water is in that bowl, it becomes that bowl. That’s how I approach it. The rhythm and rhyme of the flow are as important to rapping as melody and rhythm are to playing musical instruments.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 58) Mighty Casey further elaborates:

“Rap is music, so there has to be some musical value to it, and if you’re not adhering to certain musical values... Like if you’re a trumpet player and you’re off [the] beat, you’re not a good trumpet player. If your melodies and your rhythms don’t sound good and you’re a musician, you’re not a good musician.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 64) Edwards even goes a step further, arguing flow can be even more important than the content itself, as supported by Havoc from Mobb Deep saying: “I’m a flow person, and without the right flow, subject matter probably won’t even matter. It’s all about styles, just the way you’re getting your subject across. If people can’t feel how you’re saying it, it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 65)

Edwards proposes a schematic table as a represantation of flow, calling it the “Flow diagram” (Edwards, 1982, p. 68), even quoting several rappers who admit using a similar scheme themselves.

12

Edwards provides several real examples of the flow diagram in effect. One of the examples he uses to explain the method is from Pharcyde’s track “Drop,” from the album

Labcabincalifornia“:

Table 1: Flow diagram

1 2 3 4

Let me freak the funk, obso- lete is the punk that talks

more junk than Sanford sells. I jet pro- pel at a

rate that compli- cate their mental state as I invade their

state

masquerade. They couldn’t fade with a clipper...

(Edwards, 1982, p. 68)

Each column represents individual beats in the song and every line in the table corresponds to one line in the lyrics, most songs in rap or hip hop are organized in this rate, thus the ‘sixteen’ represented by the table is the standard small unit in rap and hip hop music.

Entire verses often have 16 lines of 4 bars each, which would be 64 individual windows in the flow diagram. Edwards explains that the syllables, not the words in bold directly under each respective number in the columns are said directly on beat and stand out by being more stressed than in normal speech.

Edwards further admits that in rap different syllables may be stressed than in normal speech in order to keep the lyrics in time with the beat (Edwards, 1982, p. 71), which he demonstrates on a part of the rap verse starting on the first line and crossing into to second one.

“Normal-Speech Stress: obsolete is the punk that talks more junk than Sanford sells

On-the-Beat Stress:

13 obsolete is the punk that talks more junk than Sanford sells” (Edwards, 1982, p. 72)

It can be observed that up to the word that the stresses match. Then the rap verse diverges from the rule of everyday speech which dictates that stressed syllables should be in constant distances from each other. The rapper made a conscious decision and said the word talks in the same segment and waited with the stress for the following word more which then altered the course of the rhyme going forward. Furthermore Edwards states that even though different syllables can be stressed than in normal speech, a stressed syllable must be said at the same time as each of the four beats in a bar (unless there is a rest on a particular beat.

(Edwards, 1982, p. 72)

Rests are later explained to be a pause, during which no syllable is said on the 1, 2, 3, or 4 beat of a bar. (Edwards, 1982, p. 73) In the example from the diagram rests occur in the second line on the third beat and on the fourth one under the second beat.

The fact that a syllable is not said directly on beat does not necessarily mean it is unstressed, as Edwards points out:

“Other syllables in the song may still be stressed, but the ones that fall in time with the four beats of a bar are the only ones that need to be emphasized in order to keep the lyrics in time with the music. Stressing these syllables may not make them seem louder or longer in comparison with any of the surrounding syllables, but they will be more distinct when compared with how those particular syllables are said normally.” (Edwards, 1982, p. 72)

Even though the individual words which are stressed do not have to match normal speech pattern sometimes for the sake of better rhythm, is is unusual for the inner-word stress to shift to another syllable. This seems to break in the provided example in the particular case of the word invade in the third line on the fourth beat. The first syllable falling on beat seems wrong at face value, since the proper pronunciation of that word in both the American and

British variety has stress on the second syllable: “ɪnˈveɪd.“ (IPA) However, after listening to the song in question, it has been observed that although the in syllable does indeed fall on the fourth beat, it does not have significantly more emphasis than it otherwise would. Whatsmore,

14 there is an intentional short pause made before the second syllable vade, which is then said with proper stress off beat and a retained rising tone. This confirms what Edwards writes about words which do not fall on the individual beats, and so this particular example can be seen as an intentional breaking of the rules for the purpose of setting up a better rhythm for the following lines.

2.4.2 Rhyme

Rhyme is massively important as one of the two elements of flow alongside rhythm.

Rapper Evidence of Dilated Peoples admits it is difficult to rhyme and get a point across at the same time, adding:

“That’s why people get props! That’s why it’s an art form, that’s the challenge of it, because we can sit here and say witty stuff all day long if we don’t have to [make it rhyme. If I didn’t] have to worry about it rhyming or sounding good, then it wouldn’t be as much of a challenge.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 82) Edwards provides four categories of rhyme, ranging from ‘strongest’ to ‘weakest’, starting with the perfect rhyme, Assonance (Vowel Sound Rhyme), Word Bending, and Alliteration and Consonance as a combined category. The first two are rather self-explanatory, however,

Edwards includes examples of the perfect rhyme such pairs as cat/hat or mug/plug (Edwards,

1982, p. 83), even using the same word to end several consecutive lines. For assonance he provides examples of words, which do not have the same consonantal ending but share a vowel sound, for example fit/hip or cat/back. (Edwards, 1982, p. 84)

The third category is the most unusual and is exactly what it sounds like – bending the pronunciation of certain words in order to fit a rhyme, which they normally wouldn’t.

Edwards writes: “MCs sometimes “bend” words, pronouncing them in a way that makes two different vowel sounds sound alike: arms / Mom’s; three / Dre.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 85)

15

The last category before compound rhymes is on Alliteration and Consonance, the former being the rhyme of words beginning with the same letter or sound, with examples

“Jimmy/joke; mama/might; light/ladder“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 86)

Consonance is explained to occur “when the consonant sounds in a word are the same but the vowel sound is different: sock/sack; cut/cot; bell/bill.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 87)

Edwards then goes on with compound rhymes and complex rhyme schemes made up of combinations of the four cardinal types mentioned.

2.4.3 Rhythm

Edwards’s next chapter focuses on the other main component of flow, rhythm, also known as cadence, which is defined in the book as

“the way syllables are placed on the beat and the different patterns that are created by different numbers of syllables. Rhythm makes the lyrics sound musical and interesting. It’s also what makes the lyrics a rap, rather than just words spoken in a random way over a beat.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 111) Regarding rhythm rapper Evidence of Dialated Peoples makes an interesting point about the notion of lyrics being much more numerous in rap songs compared to singing genres:

“That’s why rapping is also, I think, respected by other genres of music and people who sing—because they can hold one note for so long and have to say so few words to get the message across. ‘I love you,’ ‘You’re in my heart,’ ‘You’ll be here forever,’ and ‘It’s hard to sleep without you’... that’s a whole verse right there if you held the notes right. With a rapper, we can’t do that—that’s not even half a bar.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 112) Edwards highlights the importance of the number of syllables writing:

”a flow’s rhythm is largely decided by the number of syllables that are used in each quarter of each bar—the more syllables, the faster the rap. Some artists like to rap fast, some like to rap slow, and some prefer to mix it up. Some like to create random rhythms throughout a song, while others prefer to try to stay in one set pattern.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 118)

In other words the amount of syllables a rapper writes for each line and its individual quarters will have an effect on how they will rap it – if there are only a few syllables the rapper has time to say them slowly and clearly in order to fill in the beat, however if there are

16 a lot of syllables the rapper has limited time for each of them, which makes the rapping faster and increasingly less clear with the rising amount of syllables due to necessary reductions.

Early rap and hip-hop songs were rather simple in all aspects including the rhythm, as

Edwards writes, that “a lot of old-school hip-hop had very sparse patterns with very few syllables per bar.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 122)

About styles of rap, which use high numbers of syllables and are therefore faster,

Edwards writes: “in a lot of rapping styles that were influenced by dancehall/ragga, artists incorporate more syllables and faster rhythms.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 123)

Dancehall and ragga are both parts of the Jamaican cultural heritage as Wise Intelligent of

Poor Righteous Teachers confirms:

“[Using the Jamaican style of rhyming and faster rhythms came from] a lot of reggae, a lot of reggae music in the community we grew up in, a lot of yard parties. There’d be dub sessions at everybody’s house—a lot of Jamaican kids in the community, so we were at the dub sessions all the time, so it became a part of us. You are what you eat and that’s what we were taking in, [so] that’s what we became.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 124) Finally Edwards discusses rests once again in the context of rhythm, claiming they can serve several different functions, the main ones being to create a breathing space, to structure or divide a verse, to add rhytmic variety or to emphasize content.

Lyrics in rap are what makes up for the perceived lack of drawn out virtuous vocals and it occurs on both a quantitative and qualitative level. Quantitative because the sheer volume of lyrics of an average rap song far outnumbers that of most pop or rock songs. The qualitative difference lies in the fact that the lyrics of rap songs usually include much more complex rhyme and rhythm patterns than the sung ones, together giving birth to flow.

The main thing Edwards‘s insight demonstrates is that there is a lot more to rapping than merely memorizing and mindlessly reciting the lyrics, which are usually much more elaborate than in pop music or rock songs. The combination of complex lyrics with complex rhymes organized and performed with a proper flow are deemed as the highest achievement in mastering of the rap form. It is therefore not enough for rappers to remember all of their

17 endless lyrics but also the correct flow to accompany each of them, which some of them admit to forget at times to Edwards, for example Tajai of Souls of Mischief: “[I’ve forgotten flows]—that sucks. I think that’s why I started being rigorous with [writing it down], because that’ll make or break a rap. You can have the same lyrics and if you kick it wrong, it’s wack.

Forgetting the flow sucks—it’s like a wasted rap.“ (Edwards, 1982, p. 78)

Edwards’s principles of flow consisting of rhyme used in rhythm along with his flow diagram will be used in the case study.

18

3 Speech Style Shift Theories

The following chapter focuses on different theories which have been proposed as explanations for linguistic style shift. Kateřina Dudáková went through these theories in her thesis in search of an explanation for non - American pop singers adopting the American model in their music. Some of the approaches the relevance of which Dudáková acknowledged will be discussed in this chapter from the opposite perspective of rap, in which style shift is hypothesized not to occur to a major extent.

3.1 Style Shift in General

Dudáková rejected a few of the style shift theories as insufficient, for example

Attention Paid to Speech, Style Shift Based on Topic and setting and Speaker Design. The first two theories respectively say that the speaker pays different levels of attention to their speech and some of these differences are influenced by the particular topic and setting.

Neither of them is, however, specific enough with respect to the addressee as a driving factor behind the style shift.

Dudáková then introduces Speaker design, which in her words, “considers a speaker the initiator of a style shift and claims that it is speaker‘s internal motivation that drives the style shift.“ (2015, p. 14) Dudáková in the end dismisses Speaker design as not suitable to account for style shift in singing because, in her view, “singers when singing are adopting a foreign identity.” (2015, p. 15)

Next Dudáková considers the Accommodation Theory first proposed by Giles. In it a speaker can accommodate the listener both ways, either by converging towards them or by diverging from them, depending on the speaker’s opinion of the listener. The underlying intention is either to win the listener’s approval in case of convergence or to exercise social

19 superiority over them by divergence. (Dudáková, 2015, p. 16) What convergence and divergence actually mean linguistically is, respectively “a strategy whereby dissimilarities between interlocutors‘ speech styles or codes come to be reduced,“ or “the distancing of one‘s language from that of speakers one wishes to disassociate oneself from.” (Dudáková, 2015, p.

18)

Both of these phenomena involve significant style change occurring at a linguistic level. Convergence occurs in the case of pop music, which, because it was first made popular by Southern American performers has been historically tied with the American pronunciation model. Likewise, the Jamaican variety has been tied to reggae styles, which through the course of musical evolution is still present in rap and hip hop today. As a concrete example of divergence Dudáková mentions the “punk singers‘ use of localized varieties“ (2015, p. 18), adding that “punk was formed in opposition to mainstream music deploying different musical, linguistic and performance forms.“ (2015, p. 18) Rap was similarly originally supposed to oppose mainstream music, in particular the genre of disco at the time of its inception, however the two cannot truly be seen as equivalents, since, even though they both originally strived to oppose the musical and societal norms and retained their own regional vernaculars, punk music is mostly sung, therefore rap should be in this context considered even more revolutionary than punk. Dudáková notes that accommodation takes place not only on a formal level but “in order for it to be effective and appreciated by an interlocutor, a speaker needs to adapt his/her cultural values.“ (2015, p. 16)

In the case of pop music singing, the singers adopt an American phonetic set along with various cultural accommodations. In rap and hip-hop genres the artists are expected to generally retain their own regional vernacular. This will be investigated in the Case study.

In the end Dudáková rejects the Accommodation theory for the reason that even if a singer wanted to accommodate their speech towards their audience, that audience is so

20 diverse and complex that the singer would not be able to reach the desired style change accurately. Dudáková aptly quotes Beal on the subject saying that “the singer has no interlocutors: this is not a conversation” (2015, p. 18)

Rap can, on the contrary, actually be a conversation. In fact it often aims to be exactly that. For as long as rap music has been around, the concept of a ‘diss track’ has been, too. The word diss itself comes from African-American slang for disrespect and is in fact a modern form of ritual insult, which has a long history starting in the black culture in America. In fact there are different local versions of the ritual insult with different names such as playing the dozens, sounding and signifying. (Labov, 1972, p. 472) These insults often take the form of a rhymed couplet and their content usually involves insults of the opponent’s mother or other family members or the opponent himself. Labov writes:

“a mother may be cited for her age, weight (fat or skinny), ugliness, blackness, smell, the food she eats, the clothes she wears, her poverty, and of course her sexual activity. As far as persons are concerned, sounding is always thought of as talking about someone’s mother.“ (Labov, 1972, p. 480-1)

As the diss is public, it puts its victim in the spotlight and they can either step up and respond and thus risk their reputationsn, or stay silent, which is usually seen as an admition of defeat. Besides actual street rap battles, in which rappers gather in order to take turn on the microphone and rap, incorporating ritual insults, there have also been long documented

‘beefs’ between rappers expressed through diss tracks, when two or more rappers would go back and forth releasing songs in which they attacked and dissed one another for various reasons. Dissing, unless it involves actual threats of violence, is seen highly positively by the rap community. The ritual insult originated as a game in which a person had to use their sharp wits to insult their opponent, ideally without the victim even realising it. It is therefore often framed using sarcasm, irony and other comedic tools, for example complimenting a person for something bad as if it were actually really good, or saying very specific insults to a person

21 under the guise of merely quoting someone else who said those things about them. The latter form was used, as Labov writes, in the classic peace of the Ritual Insult genre, The Signifying

Monkey, in which “the monkey stirs up trouble (signifies) by telling the lion that the elephant had sounded on him.“ (1972, p. 481)

Ritual insult, including modern dissing, serves the function of a ritual in that even though it is a game social status is at stake. Labov observes:

“the winner in a contest of this sort is the man with the largest store of couplets on hand, the best memory, and perhaps the best delivery. The game usually has a clear winner and one or more losers and Labov notes that members take very sharp notice of the end result of a sounding contest... In a sounding session, everything is public.“ (1972, p. 484)

Labov overall writes about ritual insult as if it were exclusively or predominantly a male activity of measuring status, adding that there is an age limit due to the inherent obscenity of the individual insulting lines or couplets, referred to as “sounds.“ He observes that “one must be careful in using the rhymed dozens with younger boys: if they cannot top them, they feel beaten from the start, and the verbal flow is choked off.“ (Labov, 1972, p.

474)

There are therefore certain established phrases that the ‘initiated’ older insulter will say to the ‘unitiated’ younger one to test him out, usually in the form of a code phrase which is only slightly obscene and which calls for a specific response; if the correct response is provided the ritual exchange can commence.

Regarding obscenity in the insults Labov writes: “Many sounds are obscene in the full sense of the word. The speaker uses as many ‘bad‘ words and images as possible – that is, subject to taboo and moral reprimand in adult middle – class society,“ which suggests the ritual insulting is usually done by young people who are low in their social status. Due to this fact the standards for quality insults is reversed, making them the better the more obscene they are: “many sounds are ‘good‘ because they are ‘bad‘ – because the speakers know that

22 they would arouse disgust and revulsion among those committed to the ‘good‘ standards of middle – class society.“ (Labov, 1972, p. 482)

Labov emphasizes the point that there is a difference between a ritual insult and personal attack, saying the appropriate responses for the two are quite different: a personal insult si answered by a denial, excuse or mitigation, whereas a sound or ritual insult is answered by longer sequences, since a sound and its response are essentially the same kind of thing, and a response calls for a further response...“ (Labov, 1972, p. 485)

The concept of dissing in rap music builds heavily on the ritual insult model, since it aims at eliciting a response from the insultee, which can then start a long sequence of back and forth responses.

Another reason why the accommodation theory is not aplicable to singing points to another slight distinction between rap and pop music. Even though both singing and rapping are performances with large audiences made up of diverse demographics, there is a case to be made that the demographic makeup of a rap audience can be deduced to a much better extent than that of pop music. The audience in this sense is to be understood both as live audience at concerts and as fans listening to the artist’s album at home. Since pop music literally got its name for being popular, it would be virtually impossible for pop singers to calibrate their style to a particular audience member and hope the style will resonate with enough people to sell a sufficient amount of albums and concert tickets. Rap music is slightly different in this sense.

Admittedly, as rap is itself growing and reaching more people, thus becoming more popular, the differences become less significant; nonetheless, when rap first appeared the audiences were made up of young people, in fact mostly teenagers and those in their early twenties and they were predominantly minorities, since the first parties took place in Bronx and Brooklyn,

New York. These minorities initially included mostly African Americans but eventually all the other ethnicities joined the genre.

23

The language of rap has therefore historically always been identical with the language of the minorities, incorporating the latest slang and wordplay spoken in the neighbourhood.

The concept of the local underground rapper which has not been discovered by a major label goes hand in hand with being part of either an ethnic or social minority and using passion for rap to improve one’s social situation. The advantage a rapper from such a background has is enormous – they are able to accommodate their base without actually altering their speech because in the ideal scenario they already live the experience they rap about, so their vernacular form matches the everyday life content. The usage of slang and other local varieties will be demonstrated on real examples in the case study.

It can be stated that Accommodation theory is more relevant to rap than it is to singing, mainly because of the inherent differences of rapping and singing at both a formal and social level. Additionally the reasons which lead one to accommodate one’s speech shine a light on why the same can be expected not to occur in rap.

The next theory Dudáková considers is Audience Design (in opposition to speaker design), which is essentially a more elaborate version of the Accommodation theory with the distinction that it distinguishes between four types of listeners ranked by the intention of the speaker for them to hear the utterance. Ranking from the most ratified by the speaker to the least ratified they are respectively “addressees (the target audience), auditors (who are not targeted but are known to be receivers), and overhearers (who are effectively the entire population, since a mass medium is defined by its general availability).” (Dudáková, 2015, p.

21)

Dudáková throws this theory out for the reason that it would be too complicated for artists to think about pleasing all of these levels of audience members. (2015, p. 21) In rap the same can be said even more strongly, that rappers tend to mostly care about pleasing their target audience of addressees. The evidence for this is the common usage of slang and other

24 highly localized forms of language which members of the rapper‘s own community understand naturally but outside fans likely do not. The tendency of rappers to ‘preach to the choir’ ties directly to the next theory discussed by Dudáková, being Referee design, proposed by Bell. The main contribution of Bell’s theory is in its inclusion in the conversation of

“addressees who are not directly present but still have an influence on the speaker/performer.

These imagined addressees are called referees. Referee design is therefore said to be a process of identity expression, through which one distinguishes himself/herself from his/her audience.” (Dudáková, 2015, p. 21)

Bell claims that “the effect of the referee design is to make a speaker style-shift as if actually talking to the referee rather than to the addressee.” (Dudáková, 2015, p. 21)

The shift itself can go two ways in Referee design. It can either move towards an ingroup or an outgroup, which are analogous with convergence and divergence in

Accommodation theory. (Dudáková, 2015, p.22) About a speaker shifting towards his or her ingroup Bell writes: “Such a speaker takes the initiative to deliberately reject identification with the immediate addressee, and identifies instead with an external referee.” (Dudáková,

2015, p. 22) Furthermore Bell claims that an ingroup shift is usually a short term one.

Outgroup design occurs when “speakers acquire style of an absent outgroup in order to identify with the outgroup by adoption of its linguistic features, because they find the group

‘superior and its culture as desirable.‘” (Dudáková, 2015, p. 22) There is a difference between outgroup referee design and divergence in accommodation theory in that there is an

“agreement by both speaker and addressee on the status of the outgroup and its language,”

(Dudáková, 2015, p. 189) thus making it “a divergence on which communicator and audience agree“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 193)

25

As opposed to ingroup referee design, which is a short term change, outgroup RD is usually “a long-lasting change and can be even ‘institutionalized as a virtual norm.‘”

(Dudáková, 2015, p. 23)

Most rappers model themselves towards their ingroup, but because it is the standard there is no need for a shift in their style.

26

3.2 Style Shift in Pop Music

Dudáková introduces several theories on style shift in pop music, starting with Peter

Trudgill‘s American model and assertion of identity. Trudgill has observed that pop singers tend to change their normal pronunciation when singing and that the change is usually in favor of American variables. Trudgill’s social explanation was that “the majority of popular music genres are of Afro-American origin and that it is Americans who have been the best in this field and according to him ‘domination leads to imitation.‘” (Dudáková, 2015, p. 25)

Additionally Trudgill notes that as non-American singers are changing their pronunciation making it sound more American, the American ones are also shifting their styles to resemble those of “Southern or Black singers.“

Next Dudáková introduces Simpson‘s “USA-5” model and discourse analysis. The model lists the five most frequent situations which provide an environment for the variation between either American or British standard forms. Simpson’s model has been accepted as a standard and many writers have adopted it “‘as a group of salient variables which posses a defining power to determine speakers‟/singers‘ style.“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 29)

The USA features and their UK counterparts together with typical environments where the variation occurs are shown in the table:

Table 2: “USA-5 model” features in contrast to UK features.

“USA-5 model” UK features Typical environment

[ɾ] [t], [ʔ] better

[æ] [aː] dance

[r], [ɝː] r-less girl

[a] [aɪ] life

[ɑ] [ɒ] body

(Dudáková, 2015, p. 30)

27

The first variable is intervocalic /t/ in words like, which is pronounced as [ɾ] in most

American accents and as very sharp [t] or glottal stop [ʔ] in the majority of British accents.

Typical words for this variable are for example better, city or pretty. The second variable is /a/ placed between consonants in a stressed syllable, pronounced as [æ] in American English and as [aː] in RP and most other British accents. This variable is typically tied with words like dance or can’t. The third variable in the table is known as non-prevocalic [r] which is pronounced as [r] in most American styles and is either pronounced as [ɝː] or omitted completely in words like world, girl or car. The third variable is commonly known as rhoticity, making the American accents which pronounce the non-prevocalic [r] rhotic and the

British ones and others which do not non-rhotic. The fourth variable is /i/ pronounced as [a] in

(Southern) American accents and [aɪ] in General American and British accents. The South

American variety [a] is included in the model because even though it does not represent most of America, it has historically become tied with the pop music singing model. It manifests in words such as mind, fine or, most commonly in the personal pronoun I. The fifth and final variable is /o/ placed between consonants pronounced as [ɑ] in American styles and as [ɒ] in

British ones. This last variable usually occurs in words in which /o/ is placed in between two consonants and is in a stressed syllable, for example body, hot, bottom.

Beal’s Mainstream-popular-music model is analysed next. In it Beal makes an observation on British artists who chose to retain their regional accents when singing.

Beal argues that over generations the American style, which was mostly tied with pop music genres, has become synonymous with the genre itself. (Dudáková, 2015, p. 32) Music of all genres gets passed on generationally and each new wave of artists model themselves after the musical veterans of their time in their respective genre, which can explain the passing on of the American features as default in pop music even beyond the point of

Americans having a monopoly on pop music. Modern artists don’t necessarily even have to

28 be aware of the regional history of pop music springing from the American South, since those

Southern American features have become inseparable from the genre to the point of no distinction after several generations of artists continually progressing and expanding the same genre. Beal clarifies: “the phonetic features that were previously indexing Americanness has during this long time of co-existence alongside mainstream pop music started indexing mainstream pop genre.“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 31)

Similar notion to Beal’s is made by Gibson in his revisited model of Mainstream- popular-music. Gibson agrees with and expands on Beal’s notion of linguistic features acquiring indexical meaning:

“Adopting ‘American‘ variables is not about expressing one‘s stance to ‘Americanness‘ but rather to a mainstream popular music. American phonetic forms and mainstream popular music have been interconnected for so long, that there is no memory of mainstream music without it: ‘Their [singers‘] use of American pronunciation in singing is therefore the result of the fact that a majority of their memories of pop singing involve American influenced phonetic forms.‘” (Dudáková, 2015, p. 33)

Gibson refers to the merging of American style with pop music style as

“institutionalized referee design,” because, after a long development this style has become

‘official’ and recognized by the authorities and institutions.“ (Dudáková 2015, p. 34)

Beal’s and Gibson’s theories collectively shine a light on the possible reasons why many rappers even today often use Jamaican phonological varieties and slang in their songs.

In the same sense Gibson claims that “adopting “American” variables is not about expressing one‟s stance to “Americanness” but rather to a mainstream popular music“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 33), it can be argued that the adoption of certain Jamaican linguistic features does not necessarily have to signify an artist‘s adherence to Jamaicanness, but rather to rap/hip hop style. Analogically to American features becoming indexical of mainstream pop genre it can be argued that Jamaican features have become indexical of reggae and through musical evolution to a lesser degree of rap and hip hop genres as well.

29

Lastly Dudáková examines Morrisey’s Sonority of Sounds as an approach towards the style shift in singing. Morrisey’s contribution has two parts, first “he realized that British singers’ shift towards American variety is in fact a process based on principles on Bell‘s outgroup referee design and the retaining of local features that came later with punk is based on ingroup referee design.“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 35) Secondly and most importantly Morrisey considers the technical aspects of singing as opposed to only the sociolinguistic ones and proposes that higher sonority can be the reason behind the preference of one variable to the other in a pair. He emphasizes sonority as the carrying power of sounds as the most important quality determining the suitability of sounds for singing. Dudáková refers to this property as

“the singability“ (2015, p. 37) of sounds. Morrisey also analyzes Simpson’s USA-5 model from the perspective of sonority. His conclusion is that out of the five variables the only ones where the British form is more sonorous than its American counterpart is the non prevocalic

/r/. In its absence in the British varieties all that is left is the vowel pronounced as a tone and

Dudáková remarks about vowels that they are “at the top of the ‘singability‘ scale.“ (2015, p.

37)

Morrisey also claims that in the last USA-5 variable both sounds [æ] in American or

[ɑː] in British styles are equally sonorous. Dudáková refutes this, claiming “[ɑː] is more sonorous, because it is placed more in the back and it is more open.“ (2015, p. 38)

That makes the last variable the only one which is simultaneously more sonorous in and exclusive to British varieties. The only other feature which is more sonorous in British

English the non-prevocalic /r/ which is absent. However, South American accents are known to be non-rhotic, making the assignment of the r-lessness to a particular style problematic.

Dudáková then adopts the premise that if British artists were found to be opting for the

American variety [æ] over its British counterpart [ɑː] even despite its lower sonority, it would

30 be clear evidence of their style choice being driven by sociolinguistic reasons rather than by those related to technical aspects of singing.

Sonority has been argued to be the defining attribute of sounds which determines their appropriateness for singing due to the practice of prolonging certain sounds while also changing the pitch of one’s voice. Sounds in rap are usually not prolonged and the pitch of the voice tends to stay relatively consistent. The equivalent to sonority as the key element in singing are arguably rhyme and rhythm in rap, the combination of which creates flow. Flow is typical of and exclusive to the rap form.

If the style shift is to be understood the same way Dudáková treats it, meaning as a significant regional change from one’s own vernacular into a style spoken predominantly in another region accompanied by the adoption of phonological features of that area, then it can be hypothesized no major shift of such a kind occurs in rap, precisely because most rappers actually want to represent their own respective regions and communitites. In other words the role or identity they are performing is most often their own vernacular. An exception from the lack of major style shift can however be a minor one in the case of Jamaican influence. In a similar way that pop music has been historically tied with the General American model,

Trudgill argues different styles have their own default registers. Dudáková notes that “reggae is associated with Jamaican accent, folk with ‘quasi-rural’ accents (Trudgill, 1983, p. 254) and mainstream pop is associated with style that consists of certain phonetic features that are also found in American English.“ (Dudáková, 2015, p. 31)

31

4 Regional Varieties of English

There are many different styles of English spoken throughout the world, each of them made up of a unique and distinct combination of linguistic features. In the following chapters several of the regional varieties which are most often used for rapping will be introduced along with their most notable features and also the fundamental similarities and differences between them. These features, commonalities and differences will then be used in the case study to linguistically examine rap from different regions, mostly focusing on The United

States of America, where rap was born, Jamaica, whence it got its inspiration and Great

Britain, which has especially in recent years been creating new genres centered around the rap form. Volumes 2 & 3 of Accents of English Volumes by J. C. Wells will be primarily discussed for the linguistic features typical for each respective region. The first volume is introductory and mostly theoretical; the second and third volumes focus on and are titled The

British Isles and Beyond the British Isles respectively. Throughout the entire work Wells makes use of standard lexical sets, which, in his words, are:

“large groups of words which tend to share the same vowel… and are based on the vowel correspondences which apply between British Received Pronunciation and (a variety of) General American, and make use of keywords intended to be unmistakable no matter what accent one says them in.“ (Wells, xviii)

Along with Gibson’s USA-5 model as a simplified set of the main differences between general American and British Englishes, the standard lexical sets will be consulted in the case study in order to demonstrate how regional varieties of English can influence the direction of a rhyme pattern if one or more of the rhyming words belong to the set and have a constant vowel sound in both British and American varieties. Below are the 24 standard lexical sets which Wells includes in each volume of his work. The number of examples in each set has been reduced for simplicity.

32

It needs to be noted that since all regional English varieties are highly complex systems with large numbers of features of varying importance, only a selected number of the most typical features will be mentioned for each variety.

Table 3: Standard lexical sets

Vowel sound in Vowel sound in Model word Example words

RP General American

ɪ ɪ KIT ship, sick, bridge

e ɛ DRESS step, neck, edge

æ æ TRAP tap, back, badge

ɒ ɑ LOT stop sock dodge

ʌ ʌ STRUT cup, suck, budge

ʊ ʊ FOOT put, bush, full

ɑː æ BATH staff, brass, ask

ɒ ɔ CLOTH cough, broth,

cross

ɜː ɜr NURSE hurt, lurk, urge

iː i FLEECE creep, speak,

leave

eɪ eɪ FACE tape, cake, raid

ɑː ɑ PALM psalm, father, bra

ɔː ɔ THOUGHT taught. Sauce,

hawk

əʊ o GOAT soap, joke, home

uː u GOOSE loop, shoot, tomb

33

aɪ aɪ PRICE ripe, write, arrive

ɔɪ ɔɪ CHOICE adroit, noise, join

aʊ aʊ MOUTH out, house, loud

ɪə ɪ(r NEAR beer, sincere, fear

ɛə ɛ(r SQUARE care, fair, pear

aː a(r START far, sharp, bark

ɔː ɔ(r NORTH for, war, short

ɔ ɔ(r FORCE four, wore, sport

(Wells, xviii)

34

General American

The American variety was selected as the first one because America is where rap was first performed. In his third volume of Accents of English: Beyond the British Isles, Wells divides the United States linguistically into Eastern, Southern and General American accents.

He notes that the greatest linguistic diversity is found along the Atlantic coast, which was the first part to be settled by Europeans. He observes that as the thirteen original colonies started expanding westwards, they took their individual varieties with them. The result of this in

Wells’s view it that “the important isoglosses in North America tend to run horizontally, east to west. The principal speech areas can be seen as essentially horizontal bands stretching across the country.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 467)

Due to the sheer size of even the General America individually, Wells admits that

“obviously, GenAm is not a single unified accent,“ noting that “as a concept referring to non eastern non-southern accents, the labes has its uses.“ (1982, p. 470)

The main features of General American have already been listed in the USA-5 model by Simpson. Arguably the biggest distinction between American and British varieties in general is rhoticity. General American variety is rhotic, meaning /r/ is pronounced in all positions. Southern and Eastern American varieties along with most British ones are non- rhotic, meaning /r/ is only pronounced when standing before a vowel sound.

Since the limited extent of this work does not allow for a detailed investigation of all three major American regions, all of which have famous rappers representing their respective regional variety, only general American rap will be examined in the Case Study. The reason for this decision are several: GenAm is the only one of the three American varieties which is rhotic (Wells, 1982, p. 470) and non-rhoticity is already to be discussed with examples of

British rap. General American is also spoken in an area about as large as the other two smaller varieties combined and, as Dudáková has demonstrated, is also the variety most associated

35 with the popular music genres (mostly in singing, but as has been mentioned there are popular mainstream rappers who switch between singing and rapping.)

Therefore in the Case study the represantives of American rap will be carefully selected as speakers of General American, coming from the respective area where the variety is used. Simpson’s USA-5 model will be used as the main basis for the linguistic analysis of

American rap samples. There are admittedly much more linguistic features typical of GenAm, however the main five are sufficient to reliably asign a speaker to the particular variety.

36

Jamaican English

Wells writes about the Jamaican variety in a broader chapter on The West Indies and

Caribbean English. He highlights that is is “the most populous English-speaking territory in the Caribbean area.” (1982, p. 573-4) Jamaican English is the acrolectal form in a spectrum which has Jamaican Creole, otherwise known as patois or patwa, as a basilect. Wells acknowledges that due to the considerable size of the Jamaican island, it exhibits “not only wide social variability in speech, but also some degree of geographical variability.” (1982, p.

575)

Wells states that “at the upper (acrolectal) end of the social and linguistic scale,

Jamaican consonants are phonetically much as in the standard accents, apart from the use of clear /l/ in all environments.“ (1982, p. 575) Wells observes that in the mesolect and basilect several characteristics emerge, such as: “TH Stopping, Cluster Reduction, avoidance of [ʒ] and some [v], H Dropping, semivowels in words such as /kjat/ cat, /bwai/ boy.” (1982, p. 575)

The TH stopping in particular, which is typical of the whole Caribbean region including Jamaica, is defined as “the neutralization, in popular speech, of the oppositions /θ/ vs. /t/ and /ð/ vs. /d/. The popular pronunciation of thing is [tɪɳ]. This makes many pairs of words homophonous, e.g thin-tin, faith-fate.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 565)

Jamaican English is phonetically most distinct for its significant vowel shifts. Wells writes:

“/ʌ/ is back and rounded, between /ɔ/ and /ɵ/. Mid long /eː/ and /oː/ are monophtongs in middle class speech, but in popular speech usually falling diphthongs, [ɪɛ ̃ ~ iɛ], [ʊɔ̃ ~ ʊɔ], thus face acrolectally [feːs] and basilectally [fɪɜs], goat [goːt] and [guɔt].“ (Wells, 1982, p.

576) Wells notes that the more basilectal the form is, the more shifted the vowels are: “block is acrolectally [blɒk] (or sometimes with an unrounded back vowel, [blɒk]), but basilectally homophonous with black [blak].“ (1982, p. 576) This vowel shift is the predominant Jamaican 37 phonetic feature, which in the utmost basilectal forms can even result in diphtongs seemingly reversing, as has been mentioned in face. The word Jamaica itself, which in traditional RP is pronounced /ʤəˈmeɪkə/ can thus turn into /ʤˈʌmɪɜkʌ/ (IPA) or other similar variations when pronounced by native Jamaicans.

About the NURSE vowel Wells writes their basilectal pronunciation involves /ʌ/, with a following /r/ in morpheme-final position only, thus bird is homophonous with bud [bɔ̃d] /bʌd/, while fur is [fɔ̃r] /fʌr/. (1982, p. 576)

Regarding rhoticity Wells notes that in the basilect, historical morpheme-final /r/ remains except in weak syllables: thus there is a phonetically realized /r/ in near, square, star, war, four, fourth and poor, but not in letter, father,“ adding that in general “the usual unmonitored pronunciation for all social classes in Jamaica is non-rhotic in respect of letter words, the height of the central vowel used evidently correlating with social class and style.“

(Wells, 1982, p. 576)

Because of the history of Jamaican settlement being mostly driven by slave trade from

Africa, the linguistic makeup of Patwa involves tribal African languages mixed in with various forms of English which were spoken at the time. This development, with less strong influences of other major European languages, mainly French and Spanish, gave rise to a distinct Jamaican slang, which is often heavily used in Jamaican music.

There are noticable similarities between the Jamaican variety and British ones, most of all Cockney. The best examples are their common non-rhoticity, /h/ dropping, uncommon usage of fricatives /θ, ð/, which are stopped in Jamaican and neutralized with /t, d/ respectively and fronted into dental fricatives /f, v/ in Cockney. Another striking similarity are the vowel shifts. Monophtongs can be diphtongized and diphthongs shifted significantly, to the point of virtual audible reversal or inversion of their phonemes. These similarities do not necessarily have to be coincidental, as Zdeněk Nývlt has observed in his Major’s thesis titled

38

Jamaican Creole: Its Continuity in the United Kingdom. In the summary of his rather extensive work Nývlt states its main objective is British Creole, “which is shared as a common language by ethnic communities of people of Caribbean background living in the

United Kingdom… The contemporary speakers of British Creole are the first, second and third generation of Caribbean migrants.“ (Nývlt, 2012, p. 124)

In his introduction Nývlt even calls the British varieties “British Black Creoles.“

(2015, p. 5) This is of course not to say that every black person in Britain is of Jamaican origin and speaks the creole. However, the black community in Great Britain is quite populous, with almost 2 million people self identifying as being of some variety of black ethnicity in the whole of Britain, which equals to 3 % of its entire population according to the census of 2011. (Census) Presuming most of them are immigrants of various generations, it is not too far-fetched to consider the possibility of this large minority which has strong accents

(both Jamaican and other having an influence on the language continuum in Britain, especially in Britain in and around London as the most densely populated and culturally mixed area.

39

Popular London

In the process of selection of the particular British varieties to be discussed the decision was made not to include pure Received Pronunciation in a separate subchapter for the reason that there are virtually no serious RP rappers. This is due to the variety being inherently tied with the educated social strata in Southern Britain. RP is often perceived, especially by young people, as too refined in the negative sense meaning posh, both in its pronunciation and vocabulary. It is reasonable to assume most rappers want to belong to the underground subculture rather than the mainstream culture and this has consequences on numerous scopes of an individual’s life including linguistic choice as one of the main indexes of self identification with a social group. There are a few internet rappers performing in RP, however, they are usually considered parodies (both intentionally and unintentionally) and not taken seriously by the rap community. Instead of RP London style will be introduced as the most common variety spoken by Southern British rappers.

London pronunciation is defined by Wells as a spectrum with clear RP on one end and traditional working class dialect of London, or Cockney, on the other. Cockney, as Wells writes, is associated particularly with the innermost suburbs of East London, the East End.”

In Wells’s view “Cockney constitutes the basilectal end of the London accent continuum, the broadest form of London local accent.” As its typical features Wells lists “the noticeably shifted diphthongs and the extensive use of the glottal stop.” (1982, p. 302)

Most working-class Londoners, however “do not qualify as ‘true Cockneys’” (Wells,

1982, p. 302), according to Wells. He claims that throughout London, which has become much larger and socially mixed in the twentieth century, “the working-class accent is one which shares the general characteristics of Cockney,” an accent which he refers to as popular

London, claiming “it is very slightly closer to RP than to the broadest Cockney.” (Wells,

1982, p. 303)

40

As could be expected, Wells observes that “middle-class speakers typically use an accent closer to RP than popular London,” adding “the vast majority of such speakers nevertheless have some regional characteristics.”(1982, p. 303)

Wells writes that “the phonetic qualities of London short vowels do not differ greatly from those found in RP.” One of the typical features is the vowel shift in FLEECE and

GOOSE lexical sets, which in London English tend to be diphtongal, as opposed to monophtongal in RP, as stated in the table. Wells argues “the precise quality may vary considerably, and along more than one dimension of variation. The vowel of FACE is /ʌɪ/ in

London English, as opposed to /eɪ/ in RP.” (Wells, 1982, p. 307) In PRICE the London vowel tends to be backer than that of RP: I write it /ɑɪ/, as against RP /aɪ/.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 308)

Vowel shifts, which originated in broad Cockney constitute a substantial portion of the differences between RP and London accent, however they can be often problematic to delimit without the use of special equipment. Wells provides several tables which show the general tendencies in the vowel shifts of Londoners. Diphtongization of monophtongs in Wells’s view obeys the following patterns:

Figure 1: Vowel shift from RP to Cockney through Popular London

Vowel shift also takes place within diphtongs, most notably in PRICE and MOUTH.

About their pronunciation in Cockney Wells writes:

“The starting point of PRICE is very considerably backer than that of MOUTH, [aɪ] etc. vs. [æʊ] etc., whereas in RP it is fronter or perhaps identical, but definitely not backer.“

(Wells, 1982, p. 302) Therefore [aɪ] turns into [ɑɪ] and [ɑʊ] into [æʊ]. Wells refers to this

41 phenomenon as the PRICE-MOUTH Crossover – a by-product of the Diphtong Shift. Wells claims that an example of differences between Cockney and ordinary working-class London accent – popular London – people often point to is the pronunciation of MOUTH words. In genuine Cockney mouth can even be pronounced as [mæːf ~ maːf], Wells writes, adding that stereotypically, “Cockney go ‘aht and abaht‘.“ (1982, p. 302)

Another feature typical of London English is vowel in combination with /l/. London /l/ is according to Wells, “very susceptible to vocalization in syllable-final position“ (1982, p.

313), with typical examples [fɪo] fill, [fɪod] field, [foʊ] fall, [‘pɪipo] people.

The resulting sound is in Wells’s view “typically a closed vocoid of the type [o,ʊ]“

(1982, p. 313), adding it is most commonly rounded. Vocalization of /l/ is an inconsistent change still in progress and Wells writes speakers “fluctuate between using a lateral consonant and a vocoid.“ (1982, p. 313) Wells states that: “in broad Cockney, and to some extent in general popular London speech, a vocalized /l/ is entirely absorbed by a preceding

/oː/ i.g. salt and sort become homophones.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 314) The basis for the /l/ vocalization is the aproximant nature of /l/, which turns into dark [ɫ] in non word-initial positions. Because of the same classification of both sounds /l/ behaves very similarly to another approximant /r/, which is only pronounced before vowels in most British varieties.

This property is known as (non) rhoticity. In the pair salt/sort, which Wells mentions, it can be observed that both approximants /l, r/ respectively get consumed by their preceding vowels, giving rise to the same sound at the end of both words. This phenomenon when a phonological difference between two or more sounds is lost and they are pronounced interchangably is known as neutralization. The resulting neutralized sounds thus become interchangable in hearing. One of the examples Wells provides for neutralization caused by /l/ vocalization is in “words rill, reel and real, which in Cockney fall together as [rɪɤ].“ (1982, p.

315)

42

Consonants also undergo marked changes in RP under the influence of Cockney. The most notable feature coming from Cockney is /h/ dropping. Wells comments on it in this way:“it is of course common in popular London speech, though strongly stigmatized by teachers and the speech-conscious,“ further adding that “pairs such as heat-eat, harm-arm appear to be phonologically distinct, even if they are often phonetically identical.“ (1982, p.

322) Wells quotes Siversten claiming that:

“Most adult informants know where there ‘should‘ be [h]., but even when they are on their guard there are apt to be ‘slips‘ and erratic pronunciations, the same words being sometimes pronounced with and sometimes withous [h].“ (Wells, 1982, p. 322)

Plosives also show signs of unsual behaviour in London accent. The trio of plosive sounds most subject to changes is /p, t, k/. Wells argues that their aspirated forms

“must be considered the phonemic norm, more than in most other kinds of English: London /p, t, k/ are often given this realization even in the intervocalic and final environments, e.g. upper, utter, rocker, up, out, rock, where RP is traditionally described as having the unaspirated variants.“ (1982, p. 322)

The only environment where they appear unaspirated is according to Wells “following

/s/, as spin,“ adding that: “in broad Cockney at any rate – the degree of aspiration is typically greater than in RP.“ (1982, p. 322)

The main changes associated with the plosive sounds is preglottalization and glottalling, which are in Wells’s words “found in many kinds of English,“ although adding that the glottal stop is “widely regarded as a sound particularly characteristic of Cockney.“

(1982, p. 323)

Wells distinguishes between the two, defining preglottalization as a glottal closure made slightly before the oral one, overlapping with it, and released before it: [ʌʔp] up, [kæʔt] cat.“ (1982, p. 323) A stronger case is glottalling, which is “the use of a glottal closure only, without any oral closure: [‘fɪlɪʌʔ] Philip, [ɑ‘lɪʔɪʔ] I lit it.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 323) Glottalling as

43 a complete substitution of the plosive sound for a glottal stop “implies the neutratlization of the place-of-articulation oppositions, so that for example whip, wit, and wick might all be pronounced homophonously as [wɪʔ].“ (Wells, 1982, p. 323)

Another prominent feature of Cockney and therefore also of London pronunciation is

/th/ fronting, which “involves the replacement of the dental fricatives, [θ, ð] by labiodentals,

[f] and [v] respectively. This makes thin a homophone of fin, [f] and brother [‘brʌvə] rhyme with lover.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 328) This change is even acknowledged in eye-dialect spellings such as fings, bovver, wiv. (Wells, 1982, p. 328)

Wells reminds his readers that even though TH fronting occurs frequently,

“dental fricatives are used, at least sporadically, by all native adult Londoners, barring only those with speech defects,“ adding that “even the broadest-speaking Cockneys clearly have /

θ/ and /ð/ as items in their (underlying) phonemic inventory.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 328)

The last feature typical of London pronunciation is what Wells calls Yod phenomena., which dictates that the only consonants which /j/ follows freely in clusters are /p,b,v,g/, as dispute, beautiful, view, argue. (1982, p. 330-1)

44

Northern English

Wells states in the introduction to the North of England:

“from a linguistic point of view, the population of England is about equally divided between the north and the south. If we exclude the small number of RP speakers (who are scattered throughout the whole county), about half of the English speak with some degree of northern accent.“ (1982, p. 349)

The area of the North is itself highly diverse, with many large cities such as Liverpool,

Birmingham or Newcastle having their own distinct varieties including local slang, similarly to Cockney and popular London pronunciation. Due to the immense variation seen in the northern varieties only a few unifying features will be discussed here and later demonstrated on a sample in the case study. Arguably the most distinct features which the north shares is the shift of several vowels. Wells writes:

“The two most important characteristics setting northern local accents apart from southern ones are the absence of the FOOT-STRUT Split, i.e. the lack of a phonemic opposition between the vowels of FOOT and STRUT; and the absence of BATH Broadening, i.e. the use in BATH words of the vowel of TRAP.“ (Wells, 1982, p. 351)

These two features make it so that the oppositions between the vowels of both respective pairs of lexical sets get neutralized. As a result of this neutralization different rhymes can be made than in RP or London varieties. Wells writes about the BATH-TRAP neutralization that

“glass [glas] rhymes with gas [gas].“ (1982, p. 353) Analogously the words which are provided as examples of FOOT and STRUT in the table of lexical sets can end up rhyming, e.g. cup, suck, budge can all end up having the same vocal as put, bush, full in the northern varieties. This neutralization will also be demonstrated in the Case study.

45

5 Case Study

In the following chapter samples of spoken utterance and actual rap will be linguistically analyzed. At least one example of each of the four regions discussed in the previous chapter will be included. First of all, however, the methodology of the study will be delimited.

5.1 Methodology

The nature of the study is quantitative, since no songs were analyzed and transcribed in their entirety and only excerpts from different songs were examined for the occurence of the studied features. The findings therefore cannot be generalized or put into percentages of occurrence of different variables. Complete lyrics for rap songs, especially the ones not popular in the mainstreanm, are often not to be found or unreliable and faulty when they are.

The analysis uses a comparative method to compare and contrast rappers‘ spoken and rapped pronunciation. Recordings of individual rappers‘ spoken utterance will first be analyzed and asigned to either the general American or United Kingdom styles based on Simpson’s USA-5 model. The model will then be used to analyze recorded performances of the same rappers to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that rappers do not shift their normal accents when rapping. If this is confirmed, specific unique features of each regional variety will be highlighted in rap performed by artists from those respective regions. Some of the features which are exclusive to individual varieties will then be used to show how they can potentially influence the words which constitute rhyme patterns. Edwards’s flow diagram will also be used in several examples for better navigation.

The issue of explicitness and vulgar language has come up in the research. The decision was made not to search for it on purpose for shock value, but also not shy away from it, because‚ ‘improper‘ language and slang are indelible parts of rap music and the hip hop

46 culture, which presents itself as representing regular people. Whatsmore, no matter how obscene a word or a phrase can be, it still has certain phonological properties and for that reason it would be unwise to artifically polish the research samples either. A medium approach has thus been selected.

The analysis of lyrics is perceptional, as no special equipment has been used to determine rappers‘ pronunciations of words. However, to help better understand the lyrics and asign the bars to the flow diagram, a method of playing the studied songs at half their normal rate, which is an option for most videos on Youtube, has been made use of. There was an initial presupposition that this tool would be of limited help, since, most significantly in faster rap, heavy reduction of certain unstressed syllables or entire words is necessary and once it is done, slowing the record down will not restore any sounds which were already reduced. After having tested the method, the hypothesis was concluded to be mostly correct – in the fastest parts of rap it did not help much, however there were slow to medium-rate passages in which the slowing down helped tremendously. This was especially true of places in songs where one line or sentence was ending and another beginning immediately after it, which often proved confusing if the context was not clear and the words could not be deciphered immediately.

The biggest benefit of this method has been seen in transcribing the rap lyrics into a flow diagram.

47

5.3 General American: Eminem

The American rapper that was chosen for analysis is Eminem. He was born in

Missouri and later moved to Detroit, both of which are in the General American area according to Wells. First Eminem‘s regular speech will be run through the USA-5 model.

After that Eminem’s pronunciation while rapping will be compared with his regular speech.

The table USA-5 model, which has been introduced in 3.2, is shown here again for easier navigation:

“USA-5 model” UK features Typical environment

[ɾ] [t], [ʔ] better

[æ] [aː] dance

[r], [ɝː] r-less girl

[a] [aɪ] life

[ɑ] [ɒ] body

For the first part use is made of an interview conducted by Jonathan Ross on his talkshow in Britain. At 1:20 in the video Eminem says: “of course,“ and the /r/ is pronounced.

In most instances o Eminem saying the personal pronoun I, either in “I’m saying,“ (Eminem interview) at 0:58, at 1:39 in “I think,“ and others, Eminem usually pronounces the vowel as

[a], although sometime it is a full diphtong such as at 1:42, when Eminem says: “Then I kinda thought it was possible. You know what I mean?“ (Eminem interview) Both instances of I and kinda have the /i/ sound pronounced as [aɪ], although the second part is not as prominent as in

48 the British varieties. The prounciation of this variable in particular depends on the word and position to a certain degree.

At 1:26 he says the name of a rap song by LL Cool J: “Rock the bells.“ (Eminem interview) The vowel in Rock is a distinct [ɑ]. At 2:15 he corrects the Ross about the name of the director who was behind the movie 8 mile, which was written by Eminem about his life, starring him as himself, saying:“Curtis Hansen.“ (Eminem interview) The /r/ in Curtis is again pronouced, which solidifies Eminem’s rhoticity. The /t/ sound in Curtis is pronounced as weak [ɾ]. At the 4:49 mark Eminem says: “I can’t sing.“ (Eminem interview) The vowel in can’t is clearly [æ]. All of the five variables in Eminem’s speech use thus either exclusively or predominantily General American features.

Eminem’s song Lose Yourself which was released as a soundtrack to the movie 8 mile will now be analyzed and compared with Eminem’s normal accent. The first four lines after the intro are as follows:

“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.

There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready.

To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgettin'...“ (Eminem – Lose yourself)

In sweaty and vomit the /t/ is pronounced as a clear flap [ɾ]. The /r/ sounds in are, arms and there’s are not fully pronounced but not fully omitted either. In sweater, nervous, surface, forgettin‘ the /r/ sounds are much clearer, consituting a standard American [r] in sweater,

49 which is immediately followed by already, starting with a vowel, and [ɝː] in the rest of the words in which /r/ precedes a consonant. In the words vomit, mom’s, drop and bombs, the /o/ is is pronounced as [ɑ] each time. At 3:14 in the song Eminem says:

“But I kept rhymin' and stepwritin' the next cipher.

Best believe somebody's payin' the pied piper.

All the pain inside amplified by the fact that I can't get by with my nine to...“ (Eminem – Lose yourself)

The words I, pied, the /i/ or /ie/ respectively are pronounced as rhymin, stepwritin, cipher piper, inside. In amplified, my and nine the /i/ are pronounced as [aɪ]. However in all instances of I and the word pied, Eminem pronounces the [a] sound typical of the American

South.

There was no environment in Lose yourself where /a/ would be pronounced as either

[aː] or [æ]. Another Eminem’s song Without Me is used for this particular feature. In it at 2:11

Eminem uses the sound for a rhyme stretching for several lines:

“So just let me revel and bask in the fact

that I got everyone kissing my ass“ (Eminem – Without me)

The words used in the rhyme are: let, revel, bask, fact, that, everyone and ass. It can be observed the words used have both /a/ pronounced as [æ] and /e/ pronounced as [ɛ].

Out of this sequence of words those which qualify for the USA-5 model feature exemplified by the word dance are bask and, to a lower degree, ass (often spelled “arse“ in

Britain). In most UK varieties these words would be pronounced as [bɑːsk] and [ɑːs] or [æs] with a weakened [æ] respectively. Eminem pronounces them both with mid-open [æ] though.

It has thus been shown that Eminem is consistent in his regular speech and rapping pronunciations. Out of the USA-5 features the only two which show slight variation are

50 rhoticity, which can be explained by the rap culture in America being predominantly African-

American and their vernacular is usually non-rhotic, so words which end in -er have been shortened in slang, for example gangster is rarely used, instead the street form gangsta prevails.

The other feature for which both USA and UK variables were used was /i, -ie-/ pronounced as [a] or [aɪ]. Here it should be reminded that the [a] pronunciation, even though included in the USA-5 model, is actually more typical of Southern than General American.

The [aɪ] variable, even though used more in Britain, is in no way marked as distinctively

British and can be used in the American accent without a problem. Eminem uses both variables roughly in the same rate, which be again explained by the influence of the American

South, whence pop music genres originated mostly by the black community, members of which are known to shorten their /i/ sounds to [a], most commonly in the personal pronoun I.

In light of these caveots Eminem’s regular accent and the one he uses to perform are for all intents and purposes both General American, with shades of popular features of African-

American vernacular.

The analysis takes a step further and looks at possible ways in which Eminem’s accent influences the rhyme patterns he uses. For this let us return to [æ], which is perhaps the best example from the USA-5 model which has an innate influence on the nature of rhyme patterns. It can be argued [æ] represents the central position between [ɑ] and [e], which is even imprinted in the visual form of its symbol, called the æsh. In many British and Jamaican varieties [æ] tends to shift towards the more open vocals [ɑ] or [ʌ]. In most American accents it stays unchanged. Because of the intermediate nature of the æsh it can occur in rhymes with

[e] and [ɛ] in the General American accents in which [æ] is used in a significantly higher number of interconsonantal positions than in the other varieties mentioned. In most British

51 varieties [æ] can rhyme with [ɑ] or [ʌ] due to its common shift towards those more open vocals.

Since many assonance rhymes are built on the [ɑ] or [ɛ] sounds, [æ] is often used as a

‘mediator‘ or the point of conversion from either one of the ‘polar‘ vowels to the other. The words with these variables which Eminem rhymed together are once again: let, revel, bask, fact, that, everyone and ass. As at least bask and ass would likely be pronounced [bɑːsk] and

[ɑːs] in most British varieties, the same rhyme with let and revel, which are pronounced with

[ɛ] would not be possible due to large vocalic distance of [ɑː] and [ɛ].

Because of this it is possible for other words with [e] and [ɛ] to fit the rhyme, since the vocalic distance is smaller than that of the same pairs in British varieties for example. The rhyme-altering behaviour of [æ] will be analysed again from the opposite British perspective.

52

5.4 Popular London: Dabbla

Dabbla, who was born and grew up in Barnet, North London, has been chosen as a representative of the Popular London accent. Dabbla performs solo and also under different

‘entities,‘ or rap groups with other artists, most notably the London Zoo which was his first musical project. First an interview with Dabbla from 2011 which was shot for the University of East London will be examined to determine Dabbla’s individual idiolect. The first stage will make use of the USA-5 model, which was introduced in 3.2.

At the 1:08 mark Dabbla introduces himself, saying:“Hi, I’m the unsigned artist, my name is Dabbla...“ (Dabbla interview) For the first feature the word artist provides a suitable environment. In it Dabbla pronounces a the first /t/ as clear audible [t], the second /t/ at the end of the word is less prominent but definitely not [ɾ] and not glottalized either. At the 4:25 mark Dabbla says the phrase: “personal advancement.“ The second /a/ in advancement is pronounced resolutely as [aː]. The /r/ in artist is not pronounced, thus the variety is non- rhotic. The pseudonym Dabbla itself, which is apparently shortened slang for dabbler, meaning one who dabbles in something, is even spelled with non-rhoticity in mind following the phonetic form which lacks the /r/ sound. Even though British varieties are naturally non- rhotic, the final /a/ in the spelling of Dabbla could indicate reference to Jamaican English, in which the final /-er/ is even more vocalized than in the British varieties and often, especially in the more basilectal forms, even spelled with the final /a/. The vowel sounds in I’m, unsigned and my are all pronounced clearly as [aɪ]. Finally, for the last variable we go to 1:40 mark, where Dabbla is talking about his early musical education. There he says the phrase: “a lot of xylophones.“ (Dabbla interview) The vowel in lot is pronounced as [ɒ], sounding almost identical to that in of, which immediately follows. According to the USA-5 model

Dabbla’s accent falls unequivocally under the UK model.

53

Now these results will be compared with Dabbla’s rap pronunciation. The first song for analysis is by London Zoo (LDZ) entitled Armoured Truck Riddem from their Catfood mixtape. Dabbla‘s opening line in the song is: “Coming straight out the UK, all day, better learn the hard way, our way. Is it like? I’d say.“ (LDZ – Armoured truck riddem) The /t/ in better is somewhere between glottalized and what Wells calls preglottaled. It is certainly not the American variable [ɾ]. In the first line of the second verse Dabbla says: “Roll through cities,“ and here he /t/ in cities is definitely fully glottalized to [ʔ]. This even matches several words in the following lines which form a rhyme with cities: titties, shitty, gritty, pretty, which all have [ʔ] for the /t/ sounds. (LDZ – Armoured truck riddem) At 2:08 Dabbla says the word can’t, in which the vowel sound is [aː], as opposed to [æ] which would likely be there in most American accents. For rhoticity a line starting at 1:52, in which Dabbla says: “Struck a nerve, hit a chord, oh my Lord, I write my lyrics with a sword, I’m fucking bored.“ None of the /r/ sounds in nerve, chord ,Lord, sword, and bored are pronounced. The fourth feature was also used to build a rhyme, starting at 2:09, where Dabbla rhymes the words find, mind, signed and unwind. The /i/ sounds in each of them are pronounced uniformly as [aɪ]. The last feature appears at 2:30 in the rhyme drop/problem, where the /o/ in both words is pronounced as [ɒ]. (LDZ – Armoured truck riddem)

It has thus been established that Dabbla does not change his pronunciation towards the

American model when he raps, at least based on the USA-5 model, which contains the most typical points of difference between general American and UK varieties of English. Let us now investigate further how Dabbla’s natural popular London accent behaves in a rap song.

One of the features of popular London accent mentioned was the vocalization of /l/ in syllable-final positions, resulting on a rounded vocoid [o, ʊ]. This can be observed in the song in the chorus, which is rapped, not sung. The chorus, which repeats twice after each of the three verses is fitted into the flow diagram below.

54

Table 4: Flow diagram: the chorus of LDZ – Armoured truck riddem

1 2 3 4

You ain‘t

lookin‘ at no fools, my team do it all from Lon-

-don to Liver- -pool and don’t even need a tool not at

all, every one of us cool we ridi- cule, pull the

wool over all of you fools you get schooled.

(LDZ – Armoured truck riddem)

As can be seen, the lyrics start on the last beat of the previous bar. The words directly below the numbers are said on beat and stand out in stress. The rhyme throughout the chorus is built around the [ʊ] sound, starting with You and following with the words lookin‘, fools, all, Liverpool, tool, all, cool, ridicule, wool, all, fools and schooled. Out of all of these words, most would rhyme in the American variety as well due to their shared [ʊ] sound. These words are you, lookin‘, fools, Liverpool, tool, cool, ridicule, wool, schooled. However, due to the prominence of the dark [ɫ] in British varieties, the /l/ sound in all gets heavily vocalized and the whole word is pronounced as [ʊə] or even [ʊː], and because of that it seemlessly fits the rhyme with the other words with ‘proper‘ [ʊ]. In General American English the dark [ɫ] occurs in all positions. The fact that Brits use both the clear [l] in prevocalic positions and the dark [ɫ] elsewhere might therefore make them more aware of the difference, which is often exploited in a way similar to the chorus of Armoured Truck Riddem. It also needs to be mentioned that the clearest /l/ in the entire chorus appears in the last line in “all of you,“ which is pronounced as [‘ʊːləjə], so the /f/ sound in of is lost. In the second verse at the 3:20

55 mark the /l/ vocalization actually causes neutralization with /r/ in the rhyme group palm/calm/

Khan/harm. All of these words share the same vowel sound [ɑː] and the approximants /l/ in palm and calm, just like /r/ in harm are fully vocalized.

Word bending also occurs in the song at 0:49, when Dabbla says the line: I’ll leave you paraplegic, idiot, bury you in Egypt, needing a paramedic‘s immediate attention...“ (LDZ

– Armoured truck riddem) The words paraplegic, idiot, Egypt and immediate all rhyme due to the shared [iːʤ] group in mid-word positions. For paraplegic and Egypt this is the standard pronunciation in both British and American varieties, however, in idiot and immediate the /d/ because it is immediately followed by diphtongs starting with /i/ in both cases, is exaggerated.

In result idiot turns from [ˈɪdɪət] into [ˈiːʤɪət ] and immediate from [ɪˈmiːdiət] to [ɪˈmiːʤiət].

If pronounced this way, “immediate“ sounds extremely similar to “a midget.“ The word idiot specifically is often pronounced in this way in London slang and London Zoo even have a song titled Eediot, which simulates the potential spelling of the slang variety of idiot.

Additionally an example of ritual insult occurs in ATR at 2:33 where Dabbla appears to speak directly to a specific addressee: “Rolled up to the club with plus none, just me and your mum, and my thumb stuck inside her... Nah that’s too obvious...“ (LDZ – Armoured truck riddim) The insult is traditional both in its form of a rhymed couplet and also its victim, which is the opponent’s mother.

56

British Creole: Ocean Wisdom

Another rapper to be examined is Ocean Wisdom, who is currently signed to the same independent label as Dabbla, High Focus Records. On their website it is stated in Ocean’s bio that: “Camden born rapper Ocean Wisdom spent years perfecting his craft, remaining relatively quiet even in his home town of Brighton.“ (Ocean Wisdom)

In another biography of him on the website Sound Directory it is stated:“ The Brighton born rapper of Jamaican heritage has surrounded himself with a number of amazing allies including some of the biggest names in UKHH.“ (Ocean Wisdom - Chaos ‘93)

Ocean is therefore an example of a speaker of what Nývlt refers to as British Black

Creole. Whatsmore, he also raps using the same variety.

Ocean’s pronunciation in an interview and in his songs will again be compared, but because the retaining of British or American variables of the USA-5 features in rap has already been shown on Dabbla, the focus in Wisdom’s case will be placed on specific local features typical for the popular London pronunciation and British Creole, elements of both of which can be found in Wisdom’s speech. The video inteview used here was done for Rhyme on Beat in 2016. Wisdom uses a peculiar mixture of elements of both Cockney and Jamaican

English in his speech, most notably the /h/ dropping, TH fronting typical of Cockney and TH stopping typical of Jamaica. He also glottalizes heavily. In the interview at the 0:40 second mark Wisdom pronounces the word through as [fruː], which is an example of TH fronting.

(Rhyme on beat) Then at 0:45 he pronounces that one as [dɑʔ‘wʌn], which is the Jamaican feature known as TH stopping. An example of /h/ dropping was not found in this interview even in words like hard, where it could occur but this particular feature has been noted to occur inconsistently even in the same words.

57

At 3:16 Wisdom says: “The High Focus man dem,“ (Rhyme on beat) pronouncing it as [‘mʌndem] which clearly shows signs of Jamaican English in man dem, which translates to these men in most standard English varieties.

In order to see whether Ocean retains these unique features in his music a song entitled

Eye Contact which was released online as a single from Ocean’s latest album Wizville will be analyzed. In the first line in the music video starting at 1:20 Ocean says: “Advice, brother want advice.“ (Ocean Wisdom – Eye contact) First of all, brother is pronounced as [ˈbrʌdə] so the /th/ is fronted into [d] as in Jamaican. Also notable is the lack of the third person singular

/-s/ in want. This feature, similarly to personal pronouns, is often missing in the Jamaican varieties and African-American Vernacular in general. This can be explained as the English vocabulary being imprinted onto a grammar of another language which is in this way simplified. These particular features likely come from the African languages which were lexicalized by English and other languages in the processes of first-generation pidginization and subsequent second, third and later generations of creolization.

In the chorus, which is rapped, not sung, Ocean drops his /h/ in two different words: here and hardly, which are pronounced [hɪə] and [ˈɑːdli] respectively. (Ocean Wisdom – Eye contact)

In an older song of Ocean‘s called High Street more Jamaican features can be found.

In it at 0:21 mark Ocean says: “get on this bredda.“ (Ocean Wisdom – High street) Bredda is a highly distorted variation of the word breddrin, which itself is derived from brethren in traditional English. The word brethren is an exclusively plural form of brother, which African

American speakers turned to bredda as the singular version analogous with brother. In all the variations the /th/ in the middle is fully fronted. Another very typical example of /th/ fronting appears in the word thing, which in the British non-standard varieties is often pronounced as

[tɪŋ], possibly due to Jamaican influence. This fronted variety has recently become highly

58 popular especially among the young Brits in slang at least in part because of its common usage by rappers.

The examples of Ocean using his natural accent to construct rhymes can be seen in the first verse of High Street starting at 0:41, the first four lines of which go:

“Back in the day when I gave mum backchat

She would try tell a man ‘AH AH‘

Now I do that if a mana try act bad

Gus got gun but now he’s a badman.“ (Ocean Wisdom – High street)

The rhyme throughout this set of bars is based around [æ] and [ʌ] or [ɑ] sounds, which are similar enough to rhyme smoothly. In the Jamaican form the æsh is rarely used, in most common words such as man or family it usually turns to completely open [ɑ]. This can be observed on several words in the verse in which [æ], which would commonly be used in those positions in General American and most Southern British varieties including RP and London, turned into [ʌ, ɑ]. These words are: back (by itself and also in backchat), that, mana (which is

Jamaican slang for man), and the phrases act bad and bad man. The [ʌ, ɑ] sounds are expectable in mum, try and ‘ah ah,‘ now, Gus and gun however their occurrence in back, that, man, act and bad is not typical even of RP or London accent and would definitely not occur in General American.

The underlying implication of the pronunciation differences of various styles of

English is that in each of them different words can rhyme. The easiest way to explain this is on the lexical sets. There are words which are pronounced with the same vowel sound in both

American and British varieties. This means that due to the vowel shifts in each respective variety different words end up having the same (or close enough) vowel sound as the constant one from the lexical sets to function effectively in a rhyme.

59

There are two types of words with regards to regional variation: those which tend to retain their vowel sounds and those in which the vocals shift. The first group makes up the lexical sets. The second group is used as typical environments for the manifestation of USA-5 features. If only words from one of these groups are used in a rhyme, the rhyme works equally well in both British and American varieties. In the case of words with constant vocals, they don’t even change when spoken in the other variety so the rhyme stays unchanged in written and spoken form. If a rhyme is comprised of words which are applicable to the USA-5 model the vocal which rhymes actually shifts when switching varieties between British and

American, but because it does so in all words where it originally was, the rhyme remains intact, even though it has been restructured with a new common vowel in all positions.

However, when these two groups of words mix in a rhyme they give rise to combinations which can only occur in a specific accent.

This can be illustrated on the word mum from the aforementioned lines in High Street, which is pronounced the same in most British and American varieties as [mʌm]. Words such as back, man and chat would however be pronounced with [æ] in both standard British and

American varieties. The fact that these words rhyme in High Street is made possible by the strong tendency of /a/ pronounced as [æ] to shift to [ʌ, ɑ] in certain British varieties but even more strongly so in the Jamaican one.

In Eye Contact the words master, craft and Jack are also rhymed, starting at 2:23, pronounced with [ɑː, ɑː, æ] respectively. Here it can be observed that even when the USA-5

British [ɑ] analogous to [æ] in GenAm is prolonged as in master and craft, [æ] and [ɑː] still rhyme without a problem.

The last feature to be mentioned in Ocean Wisdom’s idiolect is the neutralization of glottalized plosives /p, t, k/ which are all pronounced as [ʔ]. In the second verse in Eye

Contact Ocean uses the word little three times. The first two instances he pronounces it as

60

[ˈlɪkl] and in the third one as [ˈlɪʔl]. The former is a form used regularly by Ocean Wisdom,

Dabbla and many other rappers from the London area and even occurs in spelling as lickle or likkle.

.

61

Northern English: Lee Scott

The representative of the Northern English accent is Lee Scott, who, as is stated in his bio on the Blah Records‘ website which he founded and runs: “Lee grew up on a council estate in Runcorn Town which no longer exists.“ (Lee Scott)

On the map Runcorn Town is located close to the middle between Liverpool and

Manchester, which is solid north. The typical northern English features, namely the neutralizations of STRUT-FOOT and BATH-FOOT vowels, will be shown on Scott’s songs

Nvrmnd and Goosed, which can be found on Youtube. In the first song Nvrmnd at the 0:23 mark Scott says: “Bumping Black Sabbath backwards while I practice zen, I'm taking over just don't ask me when.“ (Lee Scott – Nvrmnd)

The main thing to observe here is the TRAP-BATH neutralization, which occurs in words backwards and ask. The initial syllable in backwards and ask are both pronounced with added emphasis as short [a]. These two words do in fact belong to their respective lexical set, which can be easily tested. Back is pronounced with [ʌ, ɑ] in both UK and General American varieties. Ask on the other hand has [ɑː] in the UK varieties and [æ] in General American.

This distribution matches that of the model words for each set.

There was no place in Nvrmnd fot the other Northern neutralization STRUT-FOOT to occur in same song. It can, however, be found in another one by Scott called Goosed, in the line which appears at 1:40: “This is a pop hit for the club, 616 is for the kids in the hood.“

Here the words club and hood are intentionally rhymed on the basis of assonance of their vocals, which are both pronounced identically as [ɒ] in both words. Club belongs to the

STRUT model, which has [ɒ] in UK and General American alike. Hood belongs to the FOOT lexical set, due their shared [ɒ] sound in UK and GenAm.

62

Both examples of neutralization thus satisfy Wells’s conditions. Both rhymes which make use of the neutralized pairs of words would not be possible in any other variety of

English mentioned.

63

6 Conclusion

The thesis investigates the pronunciation of various regional styles of English in rap music, making use of both technical and sociolinguistic points of view. Rap is defined as a spoken or recited musical performance over a beat and compared in form with singing, which is characteristic for its pitch-changing and prolonged vocals. The thesis builds directly on the foundation laid out by Kateřina Dudáková in her Master’s thesis from 2015 titled Style Choice in Popular Music Singing, in which she was able to successfully demonstrate why and how the American regional variety of English is a default model for pop singers so much so that even British artists adopt the American style including accent and pronunciation when singing. The analogous hypothesis was made that since rap is defined as a spoken performance, the regional styles of rappers should in theory remain unaltered when rapping.

Firstly, theoretical approaches to style shift, which Dudáková has applied to singing, were contrasted with rap music, to determine their applicability. These theories only strengthened the hypothesis that the reasons for the style shift in singing do not apply to a significant degree to rapping, with the exception of a potential minor influence of the Jamaican English variety, which, as has been shown in the chapters focusing on the cultural history of rap, had a major influence on rap and hip hop culture as a whole in its early years.

Several major regional varieties of English were then introduced, relying on Wells’ classic linguistic study Accents of English. Four varieties were selected altogether: General

American, Popular London, Jamaican and Northern English. The reasons for the selection of these specific varieties were the large number of rappers coming from each respective region and also the vast spectrum of their combined linguistic features.

In the case study the pronunciation in normal speech was compared with that used for rap in three out of the four rappers. For the first two regional varieties, General American and

Popular London, their rappers’ speech and rap were compared using the USA-5 model in

64 order to determine the first step in the research – whether they indeed retain their own vernaculars when rapping. For both Eminem and Dabbla this has been proven to be so. This hypothesis was however expected to be confirmed, so an additional step was taken in the research in order to investigate the inherent implication of rappers using different regional varieties for rapping. An additional hypothesis has been also confirmed in that certain linguistic features which vary between regional styles can cause different words to form rhyme pairs or groups in each variety. As the best example of this phenomenon the [æ] sound was used, since there are many words in which it occurs uniformly in American and UK varieties. When met with another word, in which the feature is a variable between the two varieties, however, the vowel sound which makes up the assonance rhyme can alter the direction of the further vowels which enter the rhyme pattern. The example for this in General

American which has been shown appears in Eminem’s song Without Me and includes rhymed words such as bask and let, pronounced [bæsk] and [lɛt] respectively. Conversely in British

Creole, Ocean Wisdom has been demonstrated to rhyme words such as mum and man, due to their shared vocal, pronouncing them as [mʌm] and [mʌn] respectively. None of these pairs would rhyme in the other variety, which is caused by the varieties’ different vocalic sets. It has been noted that Cockney as the basilectal form of Popular London pronunciation has certain vowel shifts similar to Jamaican Creole, which, if combined into one accent, can result in a schism of rhyme patterns in the different varieties of English, mostly when contrasted with the General American features. The same phenomenon has been demonstrated also on

Northern English variety. Lexical sets, which retain their vowel sounds in RP and General

America, have been demonstrated to get neutralized in rap just as Wells described them in

Northern English speech accents, specifically between the STRUT-FOOT and BATH-TRAP oppositions, which became non-existent in the Northern rapper’s accent. The results of the study are conclusive for the selected examples. No special effort was made in the work to

65 exclude or suppress evidence which would suggest the contrary of the presupposed linguistic notions in rap. The songs by each rapper were chosen at random, as the discussed features could be, to a varying extent, found in all of their songs. If a certain environment in which a searched for feature was not found in the first analyzed song, more songs were scanned until the feature was found. There was not a single finding which was omitted from the Case Study due to its contradiction with the argument of the thesis, being that rappers do not change their regular styles when rapping and that this has inherent implications on the rhyme groups which it is possible to construct in each respective English variety.

66

7 References

7.1 Primary Sources

Dabbla Interview. (2011). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keOpJZ4cPLI

GOOSED. (2016). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFnNf7AqBkM

Eminem Interview On The Jonathan Ross Show [6.05-2010]. [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21V1AfuvtA

Eminem – Lose Yourself(Explicit version) official HD. (2012). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFBzSITW8I0

Eminem – Without Me(Explicit). 2016. [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hpHw5no9mE

LDZ – Armoured Truck Riddem. (2012). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN0ZT8DYrmU

Lee Scott – NVRMND (prod by Chemo) OFFICIAL VIDEO. (2016). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssE05T2iQXw

Ocean Wisdom – High Street (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (Prod. Dirty Dike). (2016). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f9NIOdiEEg

Ocean Wisdom – Eye Contact (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (Prod. Kidkanevil). (2018). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcr73-d2MI

Rhyme On Beat Interviews Ocean Wisdom. (2016). [online]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdhmK_3wH4&t=249s

IPA Phonetic Transcription of English Text. (n.d.). Available from https://tophonetics.com/

7.2 Secondary Sources

Smith, T. L. Coke La Rock. (2008, September). Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://www.thafoundation.com/coke.htm

Differences Between Rap and Hip Hop. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2018, from http://www.plasticlittleraps.com/differences-between-rap-and-hip-hop.html

Dudáková, K. Style Choice in British Popular Music Singing [online]. Brno, 2016 [cit. 2018- 04-01]. Available from

67

https://is.muni.cz/th/hf7xw/

Edwards, P. (1982). How to rap: The art and science of the hip-hop MC. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press.

Mize, C. (September , 2014). History of Rap – The True Origins of Rap Music. Retrieved April 10, 2018 from http://colemizestudios.com/how-did-rap-start/

D. D. (1989). Interview w/ DJ Kool Herc. Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://www.daveyd.com/interviewkoolherc89.html

Kool Herc. (September 30, 1998). Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://www.djhistory.com/interviews/kool-herc

Rattrey, M. Knowledge Session: The Griot Tradition (March, 2018). Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://www.iamhiphopmagazine.com/thegriottradition/

Labov, W. (1972). Rules for ritual insult in Coupland in Jaworski, Sociolinguistics: A reader coursebook (472-486), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London, Great Britain: MACMILLAN PRESS LTD.

Lee Scott. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2018, from https://www.blahrecords.com/pages/lee-scott

Main definitions of rap in English. (n.d.). Retrieved March 28, 2018, from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rap#h70136430640900

Meaning of “rap” in the English Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved March 28, 2018, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rap

Nývlt, Z. Jamaican Creole: Its Continuity in the United Kingdom [online]. Brno, 2012 [cit. 2018-04-20]. Available from https://is.muni.cz/th/kleri/

Ocean Wisdom biography. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2018, from http://www.high-focus.com/home/artists/ocean-wisdom/

Ocean Wisdom – Chaos ‘93. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2018, from https://sounddirectory.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/ocean-wisdom-chaos-93/

Quan, J. (October 2001). PETE “DJ” JONES. Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://www.thafoundation.com/pete.htm

Sedláková K. Suprasegmentals in Czech Speakers of English [online]. Brno, 2018 [cit. 2018- 04-02]. Available from

https://is.muni.cz/th/mfuwj/

68

The Difference Between Rap & Hip-Hop. (September, 2013). Retrieved April 1, 2018, from http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/the-difference-between-rap-hip-hop-798

Wells, J. C. (1982a). Accents of English volume 2: The British isles. Cambridge University Press.

Wells, J. C. (1982b). Accents of English volume : Beyond the British isles. Cambridge University Press.

2011 Census: Ethnic group, local authorities in England and Wales. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-and-quick- statistics-for-local-authorities-in-the-united-kingdom---part-1/rft-ks201uk.xls

69

7 Summary (English)

The thesis focuses on the inherent technical and social differences between rapping and singing. In the introduction a hypothesis is made that because of the fundamental opposition of the rapping and singing forms, the individual regional varieties of English spoken by different rappers would be retained in their rap pronunciation. The definition, cultural history and technical aspects of rap are first clarified. The focus then shifts to various reasons behind the shift of one’s linguistic style or variety, both from the general perspective of regular speech and from that of pop music singing. Various speech style theories are commented on and applied to rap music based on its social and technical aspects. Subsequently, a few selected regions where rap is popular are delimited based on their respective geographic regions and linguistic features. The Case Study follows, which is entered with a two-level hypothesis – first of all, that rappers do not shift their speaking styles when rapping and secondly, that this retention of individual styles has an implicit influence on the rhymes which can be constructed in each respective variety and thus also on the overall lyrical content of the rap songs. Both of these hypotheses are unambiguously confirmed on particular examples of

General American, British Creole, Popular London and Northern English rappers, all of whom retain their own idiolects and use them to their advantage when writing and performing rap lyrics.

70

8 Summary (Czech)

Práce je zaměřena na zásadní technické a sociální rozdíly mezi rapem a zpěvem. V úvodu je předložena hypotéza, že z důvodu fundamentální protikladnosti forem rapu a zpěvu budou jednotlivé individuální místní variace angličtiny, kterými mluví různí rappeři, ponechány v jejich rapové výslovnosti. Nejprve jsou objasněny definice, kulturní historie a technické aspekty rapu. Pak se pozornost přesouvá na různé důvody stojící za změnou jazykového stylu jednotlivců, jak z obecného hlediska všední řeči, tak z hlediska zpěvu v populární hudbě.

Rozličné teorie zabývající se změnou stylu řeči jsou zhodnoceny a aplikovány na rap na základě jeho společenských a technických aspektů. Následně je vymezeno několik oblastí kde je rap populární na základě jejich geografických regionů a jazykových rysů. Následuje případová studie, která je zahájena hypotézou ve dvou úrovních – zaprvé, že rappeři nemění svůj hovorový styl, když rapují, a zadruhé, že tohle zachování individuálních stylů má implicitní vliv na rýmy, které je možné sestavit v každém jednotlivém stylu, a tedy taky na celkový lyrický obsah rapových písní. Obě tyto hypotézy jsou nesporně potvrzeny na konkrétních příkladech rapperů reprezentujících styly obecná americká angličtina, Britská kreole, populární londýnská angličtina a severoangličtina, ze kterých si všichni zachovávají svoje idiolekty a užívají je ve svůj prospěch, když píšou a předvádějí svoje rapové texty.

71