Hip-Hop Through the World Englishes Lens: a Response to Globalization
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
World Englishes, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 195–208, 2006. 0883–2919 Hip-hop through the world Englishes lens: a response to globalization TOPE OMONIYI* ABSTRACT: This paper proposes that global popular culture and, specifically, hip-hop music offers prospective sites for examining interaction between varieties of English in the context of globalization. The data consist of extracts from Nigerian hip-hop song lyrics. Sociolinguistic features of fusion as a social process of globalization include divergence through (deliberate) phonological variation, codeswitching, cross-referencing, nicknaming, colloquialisms, and reinterpretation. INTRODUCTION It is axiomatic to assert that the Outer and Expanding Circle varieties include some Inner Circle speech forms. It is equally reasonable to contend that some of the structures and features of Other Circle Englishes can now be found in the Inner Circle as a result of society’s fluidity and continuous interaction between people from all three Circles through population migration and other factors. This phenomenon is explainable in terms of sociolinguistic and socio-psychological processes of convergence and accommodation. In the era of globalization, (selectively) open borders and migration are the new reality. South African emigration to New Zealand (post-apartheid), Somali and Sudanese people dispersed across Europe and North America, to name a few, have meant that the geography of identity is changing through the inevitable mixes, integration and assimila- tion that occur. Now portions of Inner Circle space are occupied by Outer Circle popula- tions and codes. Even without migration, the character of contact in contemporary times in both the Outer and Expanding Circle countries has been influenced by a colossal English media enterprise, the content of which permeates all domains of human interaction. Consequently, we have an expanding body of evidence of contact phenomena such as language ‘‘crossing’’ (Rampton, 1995) in various domains including entertainment in general and music in particular. Bamgbos.e (2001: 359) claims that: The global use of English has meant the spread of certain varieties of English. For example, owing to the influence of pop culture (in particular, pop music), cable television, Hollywood movies etc., American English and American culture are spreading fast. To buttress his claim, Bamgbos.e refers to his Nigerian experience, how on an FM radio station ‘‘the DJ was carrying on with his American accent and Americanisms’’ (Bamgbos.e, personal communication). This, according to Bamgbos.e, made it difficult to identify the station as an African one. Media deregulation, a feature of globalization in Nigeria, has enabled entrepreneurs, multinational and transnational companies, especially in the com- munications sector (radio and television), to employ Americans and American-trained ‘‘Others’’ in their establishments such that the American accent and Americanisms heard * Roehampton University, London, UK. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] ª 2006 The Author. Journal compilation ª 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 196 Tope Omoniyi may not always exemplify local convergence to a global norm. Cool FM (96.6 MHz) in Lagos where the African American radio DJ Dan Foster works is a case in point. Both British and American accents, Britishisms and Americanisms are heard on Unilag FM (103.1), the local radio station operated by the University of Lagos at Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria. This kind of ‘‘diffusion’’ of language varieties through radio demonstrates con- cretely how the Americanization of Nigerian English may (not) be taking place. For Nigerian hip-hop artists, hybridization, or fusion as it is called in that community of practice, signals a desire to preserve aspects of their Outer Circle identity and at the same time acknowledge and recognize the reality of social change that includes Inner Circle norms as a consequence of globalization in contemporary society. Home-based Nigerian artists, for instance, appropriate and indigenize African American and diasporic Nigerian rap forms (see Krims’ discussion of the roots of rap music, 2000: 123). This appropriation may be termed a ‘‘re-appropriation’’ of forms, codes and practices that were previously exported and appropriated during the slavery era (Omoniyi, 2003, forthcoming). The musical form went through an acculturation process on the plantations and on its return is re-acculturated to fit the new multilingual repertoires of the artists. Such sociocultural processes and milieus have been conceptualized as ‘‘the third space’’ (Bhabha, 1994, 1995; Kramsch, 1995). Bhabha (1994: 1) for instance notes that: What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. Bhabha’s reference above to the ‘‘in-between spaces’’ acknowledges the experience of shifts from two or more established culturally normative positions to a new one, which then constitutes the location of a new identity. This new site of identity negotiation is what is referred to in this discussion as the third space, occasioned by the tensions of globalization. NIGERIAN HIP-HOP Hip-hop in Nigeria has a relatively recent history.1 It gained popularity in the 1990s. Alim (2003: 55) reports that practitioners define the six major elements of hip-hop culture as follows: MCing (rapping), DJing (spinning records), break dancing (also known as ‘‘street dancing,’’ an array of acrobatic dances associated with the hip-hop cultural domain), graffiti art (also known as ‘‘writing’’ or ‘‘tagging’’ by its practitioners), knowledge and ‘‘overstanding’’ (more than a cursory understanding of something, an ability to read between the lines to arrive at a deeper, sometimes hidden meaning). I shall add the adoption of pseudonyms by hip-hop artists to these six features. The lyrics analysed here are constitutive of the MCing element of hip-hop. Nigerian hip-hop differs from the mainstream in its utilization of Pidgin rap, a variant of rapping that is local to Nigeria and which arguably has assumed a translocal dimension in its use by diaspora Nigerian artists like JJC and the 419 Squad based in South London, England. In Nigerian hip-hop this new site is discursively negotiated and constructed through the employment of linguistic tools such as codeswitching (CS), reinterpretation, (co-)referencing, and colloquialisms. Nigerian hip-hop may be described as a sub-variety ª 2006 The Author. Journal compilation ª 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Hip-hop through the world Englishes lens 197 of ‘‘Afro hip-hop’’ by looking at the features of CS. Afro hip-hop is itself a sub-variety of ‘‘mainstream’’ global hip-hop with all the ideological implications of that (Toynbee, 2002). If we take as an analogy the equalization of the globalization of English with the social cum political process of Americanization (Phillipson, 2004), hip-hop is American or Western hip-hop in the global cultural flow. In other words, hip-hop is a global music tradition that owes its core descriptive features to a mainstream (Western) form. Nigerian and all other hip-hop varieties are thus, like the Englishes of Outer and Expanding Circle countries, its indigenized varieties. The globalization of hip-hop has occurred in a number of ways, prominent among which is the growth of Music Television (MTV) into a formidable force (Zuberi, 2002: 240). One popular media source for Nigerian hip-hop has been the MTV-UK MTV Base request show. Several of the requests on the programme (e.g., a kick-off airing prime-time, February 19, 2005 from 5–8 pm) came from Nigeria or Nigerians in diaspora. This is an indication of the sizeable following that global hip-hop has among this population. More importantly, it signals the ongoing dialogues and interactions between these two groups. It also suggests that there is a Nigerian market for hip-hop. South Africa and a few other countries on the continent boast similar hip-hop popularity. Presumably this is the core factor behind MTV’s decision to set up its 100th channel in Africa and consequently create a potential boom in local hip-hop.2 Singh and Doherty (2004: 9) describe the cultural contact zones of English: English for academic purposes, and foundation preparatory programmes as ‘‘sites of internationalized education’’ which result from and contribute to the cultural processes of globalization. By analogy then, hip-hop, rap, and RnB (Rhythm and Blues) are sites of internationalized entertainment which result from and contribute similarly to the same cultural processes of globalization. The notion of culture flow within the framework of globalization has been theorized either as cultural imperialism, in which urban and cosmopolitan cultures are imposed on provincial and peripheral communities, or as resistance, in which the prov- inces and peripheries appropriate the codes and forms of the mainstream and transform the hybrid into a valuable and popular commodity. Resulting forms become a new alternative mainstream which provides a ‘‘means of hearing through difference’’