1. INTRODUCTION: YOU KNOW MY STEEZ My style be wilder than a kamikaze pilot Don’t try it, I’m about to start more than a friggin’ riot Style’s unsurpassable . For I be speakin from my parables and carry you beyond The mic’s either a magic wand Or it gets tragic like the havoc of a nuclear bomb . Phat beats, they play on Want dope rhymes, put me on Word is bond . You know my steez —Guru, “You Know My Steez,” 1998 My style’s incognito I’m sharper than a razor blade dressed up in a black tuxedo Word to Reggie Noble, and to Shaq Forget Schwarzenegger, I’ll be back You know my steelo . You know my style, you know my steelo. You know my style, you know my steelo —E. Sermon, “My Style, My Steelo,” 1994 It’s necessary, we styles in Burburry And our walk is mean in them Frankie B. jeans bwoy Its necessary, we stays in Burburry And a Mark Jacob bag and a H-Tod shoe (Whooooo!) —Foxy Brown, “Stylin,” 2002 I mean, for like, to be cool, to be labeled Hip Hop and like in that category, you have to, for boys, it’s like the whole sag thing. You can’t have your pants all the way up here like Alonzo! [laughter] . He has his pants way up here with the belt and he’s like . like how Bilal and Careem have their pants right now, like here, saggin a little is cool, but you’re labeled like a square if you have 1 DownloadedPADS89.01.Chap1.indd from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/89/1/1/452189/PADS89.01.Chap1.pdf1 1/21/2005, 4:32 PM by guest on 28 September 2021 2 pads 89: you know my steez your pants like here [high on your waist] and they’re tight . like Alonzo’s, he’s a square cuz his pants too high! Usually, if you wear a belt, you’re not supposed to see the belt, and you’re supposed to have your shirt over the belt, and [laughter] that’s just the Hip Hop style. Hip Hop language is just, like, the way we talk to each other. How we talk normally, that’s Hip Hop. —Amira, 17-year-old Sunnyside Sista This project is an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Before de- scribing the research, I’d like to introduce some of the terms in the title. I use the term Black American for two main reasons. First, as Goodwin (1990) noted in Philadelphia approximately three decades ago (she collected her data in the 1970s), ethnographic observations in this suburb indicate that community members use the term Black far more often than African American to describe people (“Nah, she talkin about that ‘Black girl’ over there”), events (“I’m puttin together the ‘Black fashion show’ this year”), and in- stitutions (“The ‘Black church’ don’t be knowin what’s goin on with these young kids out here”). The phrase Black American as a whole, however, is not ethnographically derived, since hardly any community members (except some Caribbean and African mem- bers) refer to “African Americans” as “Black Americans.” I chose to use Black American instead of just Black to indicate that the context of the study was in the United States, as opposed to the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Guyana, Egypt, or any other place where Blacks be. While I understand that Black is often used to invoke unity and strength within the African Diaspora, I use Black American to con- sciously disambiguate “Blackness,” that is, to recognize the multi- plicity of ethnicities within Black peoples. My ethnographic research on the Hip Hop Nation Speech Community shows that this community places an extraordinary emphasis on the creativity and distinctiveness of one’s style. Style. Steelo. Steez. The fact that there are at least three different lexical items to describe the concept of style in Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) underscores its importance to the community. Often- times, when sociolinguists be talkin about style, they ain’t talkin DownloadedPADS89.01.Chap1.indd from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/89/1/1/452189/PADS89.01.Chap1.pdf2 1/21/2005, 4:32 PM by guest on 28 September 2021 Introduction: You Know My Steez 3 about the same ishhh that the quotes above is talkin about, you know what I mean? (see Irvine 2001). When rapper Guru spits, “My style be wilder than a kamikaze pilot,” he’s engaging in the highly descriptive Black American practice of boasting (Koch- man 1981), which is found throughout Hip Hop (Rickford and Rickford 2000; Alim 2004e). Guru let it be known that his style is “unsurpassable” cuz he known for spittin “dope rhymes.” Hip Hop- pers spend so much time talkin about style that some MCs dedicate entire songs to describin they style. In one collabo effort by Erick Sermon, Redman, and Shaq, heads remember how Erick Sermon (known for his humor) made us all laugh when he described his style as “sharper than a razor blade dressed up in a black tuxedo” and Redman (known for his humor and rawness) rhymed “my styles act wild like Jurassic Park after dark!” There are countless examples of this in Hip Hop texts. From Redman’s line, we know that rappers also talk about the importance of having a range of styles in addition to your main, dis- tinct rhyming style. I mean, cats be flippin and flexin madd styles. On any given day, you might could hear a MC say, “Yo, I got styles for days.” Flippin styles refers to a MC’s ability to lyrical styleshift, like how Eve flipped into that Caribbean dance hall style on “Eve of Destruction” and smashed on MCs in two different styles. And y’all remember when Jiggaman flipped into that crazy-fast style he useta flex years ago when he was a youngen rappin wit Big Jaz on “Nigga What? Nigga Who?” and Big Jaz claimed the fast-paced rhyme style that young bucks be doin today when he spit it machine-gun style, “Nigga, yo style no style, my style hostile!” Originality, creativity, and versatility are all necessary components in forming one’s style(s). As Wu-Tang Clan MC Raekwon once told me, Style, you know what I mean, you just gotta be original. You gotta be able to say things, you know, automatically that people don’t normally say. You gotta design your own flow, you know what I mean? Because it’s so many people out there with different type of flows, but if you make your own flow up, that makes you more original and makes you one of the more outstanding MCs. [Alim 2001, 29] DownloadedPADS89.01.Chap1.indd from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/89/1/1/452189/PADS89.01.Chap1.pdf3 1/21/2005, 4:32 PM by guest on 28 September 2021 4 pads 89: you know my steez It’s this shared understanding of style within the HHN that caused rapper Craig Mack to tell all other MCs, “get off my tip and stop jockin my style,” in what was one of the biggest Hip Hop hits of 1997. As we can also see from Sista Amira’s quotation above, some members of the community believe that there is a Hip Hop style, or styles, of dress. In the passage above, she talkin about how dudes would usually dress wit they pants saggin, shirt out, and all that. That’s the more street-affiliated brotha, you know. It’s some Hip Hop styles that encourage the most expensive name brands avail- able. In Foxy Brown’s “Stylin,” she say it’s “necessary” that “we styles in Burburry” and runs down a list of brand name fashion design- ers. Even within recognizable styles of dress and rap, the individual members of the HHN appreciate an aesthetic that is highly styl- ized—you can’t just be like everybody else; you gotta add your own flava to it, you know. Importantly for this study, style can also refer to a way of talkin. If you notice in all of the lyrics, there are distinct Black Language (BL) features, such as invariant be (“my style be wilder” and “For I be speakin”), copula absence (“my style hostile”), and durative verbal -s (“we styles” and “we stays”; notice how styles is used as a verb here). Amira makes the connection between HHNL and the everyday language of her local Sunnyside speech community: “Hip Hop language is just, like, the way we talk to each other. How we talk normally, that’s Hip Hop.” A key phrase in Amira’s comment is “to each other,” cuz it reminds us that language is inherently in- teractive, as can be said of speech style. For instance, yeah, we know Guru’s style’s “unsurpassable” and that it can create the “havoc of a nuclear bomb,” but what’s important here is that he tells the audi- ence repeatedly, “You know my steez.” Yo, a style ain’t a style if it ain’t recognizable. Plain and simple. This is a key point in that it relays the message that style is a coconstructed phenomenon. It’s gotta be a audience for style to even be relevant. Erick Sermon and Redman kick the same message: “You know my style, you know my steelo.” This element of recognizability, as we’ll see, is important not only for the way MCs drop rhymes, but also for the way we talk and interact in everyday conversation.