(no subject)
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Historical Sources of Rap:
The African-American “Oral Tradition”
I want to identify a number of cultural sources that rap has drawn from
and to thereby say a little bit about the linguistic tradition of which rap is
the most recent chapter. We cannot fully review this history-
unfortunately we do not have time for that-but only sketch a few African
and African-American speech genres which rappers have, in one way or
another, taken up and transformed, genres that are really distinctly
African or African-American, not part of mainstream American culture.
The first genre is West-African, and as much as it is a genre, it is
also a profession. The profession is called griot, which can be translated
as news-singer or ard or rhapsode. Griots were (and continue to be) the
oral historians of West-African societies, and they also deliver news.
They do so by travelling from village to village and singing the news, the
history of the “tribe”, or traditional folk-tales, accompanying themselves
by various string instruments. The profession of the griot is a family-
trade: the skills-and the knowledge, i.e., the history-is passed on from
generation to generation (typically from father to son) within a griot
family. Let me quote the griot Foday Musa Suso from Mali:
I come from a griot family, the Suso family. We have been grios from
the beginning of the Malian empire, for 800 years. Wherever you go
in West Africa... you find the griots. We are the keepers of Mandingo
history. ... A griot is an oral historian. Griots were trusted court
advisors to the kings of West Africa from the 12th century to the
20th. Every griot wanted a griot to recite the history of the kingdom,
and to pass it down from father to son. History wasn’t written
down-everything was memorized and recited or sung.
Even if you don’t play an instrument, you are respected because of
your knowledge. Your words are enough. ... Griots are travelling
families. You cannot be a griot and stay in one place. Even today,
you see griots travelling with their koras, moving between cities and
towns. The griots are walking libraries, with knowledge of the past,
present and future of our people. ... There is so much history. Some
of our songs last two days. ... Telling two hundred years of history
takes a long time.
Some rappers are also oral historians. They preserve the history of
the civil rights struggle, of African-American leaders as well as of prior
genres of African-American music (for example, funk). By doing that-and
by communicating this body of knowledge to a largely teengage
audience-they have in fact revived the memory of these struggles and
Page 2
passed it on to a new generation: they have served as educators, in
other words. And they have also spread the news about current
struggles, about poverty, depression, and family problems across the
African-American community. In the words of Chuck D. of Public Enemy,
“rap is like the underground Cable News Network of the African-American
community”.
Another source, not related to the content of rap, but to the
form-that is, to the very method of speaking to a beat-is the tradition
of the African-American church, that is, the distinct musical delivery of the
African-American preacher. We notice a number of features:
1. the merging of speaking and music: the distinction between
these seemingly different practices collapses; what the
speaker-and what is also true of rappers-is both music and talk.
And, as a result of that,
2. The pastor moves in a rhythmic fashion-he might even dance, as
we all do to music that has a beat.
3. The preacher constantly interacts with his audience which talks
back to him-at specific points in his sermon, typically the end of a
line; this form of interaction (which you will find in few white
churches, with some exceptions as I will point out later) is known as
call-and-response.
4. (and finally), the preacher does not receive the beat to which he
preaches from a drum-machine or a beat-box, but he generates it
himself. He does this by speaking in a particular fashion:
(a) he parses or phrases his sentences in a rhythmic fashion;
(b) he uses a feature known in poetics as parallelism: he delivers
one line that has particular syntactic and prosodic features, and
then he constructs the next line in exactly the same syntactic and
prosodic fashion. This is what generates the rhythm or the beat: as
soon as you construct a line that matches the previous one, you
have rhythm, and now the audience can anticipate the rhythmic
features of the next line and the next line until there is a break and
a new rhythmic patterns is established.
But these musical features of speaking-rhythmic parsing,
parallelism, construction of lists-were not entirely restricted to the
church. We heard a segment from the documentary When We Were Kings
about Muhammad Ali’s world-championship fight against George Foreman
in Zaire (now renamed Congo, the country in which a cicil war is raging as
I speak). Muhammad Ali was not only a phenomenal boxer, but also a
phenomenal speaker, and it was his speaking ability along with his
personal courage and musical boxing style which endeared him to so
many people. Notice the parallelism and lists in Ali’s speaking.
Page 3
Another traditional African-American speech genre, never practiced
in the church, but on the street, is known as playing the dozens. These
are ritualized verbal duels, and they do in fact have counterparts in other
cultures, for example in Turkey and Lebanon. When you play the dozens,
you make an insult (often a sexual insult) of your opponent’s mother,
and your opponent, if he does not want to appear lame, must come back
with an insult of your mother (or some other relative), a come-back which
is the better the more it parallels the syntax of the opening move. Here
is an example from a study by the sociolinguist William Labov:
(1) Your mother got funky drawers.
Your mother got braces between her legs.
Also:
(2) Your mother eat cockroaches.
Your mother eat fried dick-heads.
Your mother suck fried dick-heads.
Your mother eat cold dick-heads. (=she’s so sloppy she doesn’t
even fry them)
Sometimes, perhaps even more often, the game and the insult are only
insinuated, for example, when someone calls you a name and you
respond simply by saying Your mother. (Note this game also explains a
scene in Style Wars-which made some of you laugh because you know the
cultural background, when one kid complains that another was talkin’
‘bout his mother.
The dozens, too, have become part of the wider culture. When my
son (who is white) went to elementary school here, he would sometimes
come home and say things like: “You’re mother’s so fat she needs her
own zip-code.”
Rappers don’t exactly play the dozens, but when they battle, they
also ritually insult one another. We will see a lot of that later.
Yet another African-American speech genre that reappears in rap
are the toasts. Toasts are rhymed folk-tales about various mythical folk-
heroes. The most famous ones are Staggolee, a gangster (who is
actually based on a real person), Shane who by his wit survived the
sinking of the Titanic, and-to me the most intersting one-the Signifying
Monkey (which apparently was brought to America by the slaves from
West-Africa); it may originally have been a Yoruba figure. The signifying
monkey always does one thing: he tells the lion that the elephant has
insulted him (the lion, or vice versa), which makes the lion get into a fight
with the elephant. He gets bruised and beaten and comes back to beat
up the monkey. Sometimes the monkey escapes onto the tree,
sometimes he gets beaten, but he always comes back to signify some
more: he just can’t repress his linguistic wit.
Page 4
The signifying monkey is an embodiment of the poor man’s values
and dreams: he is weak and only has his speaking skills to survive on,
and he uses it to play the powers of the jungle against one another.
These folk-tales also make a statement about how African-Americans see
their own culture-specific speaking skills: for, the lion’s problem is that he
does not realize that the monkey is only signifying-he takes him literally.
He is culture-blind. He does not understand that this is play. So if you said
to me “Your mother.” and I said in response: “Yes? What about her?”, I
would also demonstrate that I don’t know what signifying is.
[Signifying Monkey]
As for the toasts, some rap-pieces are constructed in a similar form;
As for signifying, you will find a lot of that-listen to Big Daddy Kane or
L.L. Cool J. (short for “Ladies love cool James). Or, if you want to know
more about signifying, you can also watch Eddie Murphy’s movies
Historical Sources of Rap:
The African-American “Oral Tradition”
I want to identify a number of cultural sources that rap has drawn from
and to thereby say a little bit about the linguistic tradition of which rap is
the most recent chapter. We cannot fully review this history-
unfortunately we do not have time for that-but only sketch a few African
and African-American speech genres which rappers have, in one way or
another, taken up and transformed, genres that are really distinctly
African or African-American, not part of mainstream American culture.
The first genre is West-African, and as much as it is a genre, it is
also a profession. The profession is called griot, which can be translated
as news-singer or ard or rhapsode. Griots were (and continue to be) the
oral historians of West-African societies, and they also deliver news.
They do so by travelling from village to village and singing the news, the
history of the “tribe”, or traditional folk-tales, accompanying themselves
by various string instruments. The profession of the griot is a family-
trade: the skills-and the knowledge, i.e., the history-is passed on from
generation to generation (typically from father to son) within a griot
family. Let me quote the griot Foday Musa Suso from Mali:
I come from a griot family, the Suso family. We have been grios from
the beginning of the Malian empire, for 800 years. Wherever you go
in West Africa... you find the griots. We are the keepers of Mandingo
history. ... A griot is an oral historian. Griots were trusted court
advisors to the kings of West Africa from the 12th century to the
20th. Every griot wanted a griot to recite the history of the kingdom,
and to pass it down from father to son. History wasn’t written
down-everything was memorized and recited or sung.
Even if you don’t play an instrument, you are respected because of
your knowledge. Your words are enough. ... Griots are travelling
families. You cannot be a griot and stay in one place. Even today,
you see griots travelling with their koras, moving between cities and
towns. The griots are walking libraries, with knowledge of the past,
present and future of our people. ... There is so much history. Some
of our songs last two days. ... Telling two hundred years of history
takes a long time.
Some rappers are also oral historians. They preserve the history of
the civil rights struggle, of African-American leaders as well as of prior
genres of African-American music (for example, funk). By doing that-and
by communicating this body of knowledge to a largely teengage
audience-they have in fact revived the memory of these struggles and
Page 2
passed it on to a new generation: they have served as educators, in
other words. And they have also spread the news about current
struggles, about poverty, depression, and family problems across the
African-American community. In the words of Chuck D. of Public Enemy,
“rap is like the underground Cable News Network of the African-American
community”.
Another source, not related to the content of rap, but to the
form-that is, to the very method of speaking to a beat-is the tradition
of the African-American church, that is, the distinct musical delivery of the
African-American preacher. We notice a number of features:
1. the merging of speaking and music: the distinction between
these seemingly different practices collapses; what the
speaker-and what is also true of rappers-is both music and talk.
And, as a result of that,
2. The pastor moves in a rhythmic fashion-he might even dance, as
we all do to music that has a beat.
3. The preacher constantly interacts with his audience which talks
back to him-at specific points in his sermon, typically the end of a
line; this form of interaction (which you will find in few white
churches, with some exceptions as I will point out later) is known as
call-and-response.
4. (and finally), the preacher does not receive the beat to which he
preaches from a drum-machine or a beat-box, but he generates it
himself. He does this by speaking in a particular fashion:
(a) he parses or phrases his sentences in a rhythmic fashion;
(b) he uses a feature known in poetics as parallelism: he delivers
one line that has particular syntactic and prosodic features, and
then he constructs the next line in exactly the same syntactic and
prosodic fashion. This is what generates the rhythm or the beat: as
soon as you construct a line that matches the previous one, you
have rhythm, and now the audience can anticipate the rhythmic
features of the next line and the next line until there is a break and
a new rhythmic patterns is established.
But these musical features of speaking-rhythmic parsing,
parallelism, construction of lists-were not entirely restricted to the
church. We heard a segment from the documentary When We Were Kings
about Muhammad Ali’s world-championship fight against George Foreman
in Zaire (now renamed Congo, the country in which a cicil war is raging as
I speak). Muhammad Ali was not only a phenomenal boxer, but also a
phenomenal speaker, and it was his speaking ability along with his
personal courage and musical boxing style which endeared him to so
many people. Notice the parallelism and lists in Ali’s speaking.
Page 3
Another traditional African-American speech genre, never practiced
in the church, but on the street, is known as playing the dozens. These
are ritualized verbal duels, and they do in fact have counterparts in other
cultures, for example in Turkey and Lebanon. When you play the dozens,
you make an insult (often a sexual insult) of your opponent’s mother,
and your opponent, if he does not want to appear lame, must come back
with an insult of your mother (or some other relative), a come-back which
is the better the more it parallels the syntax of the opening move. Here
is an example from a study by the sociolinguist William Labov:
(1) Your mother got funky drawers.
Your mother got braces between her legs.
Also:
(2) Your mother eat cockroaches.
Your mother eat fried dick-heads.
Your mother suck fried dick-heads.
Your mother eat cold dick-heads. (=she’s so sloppy she doesn’t
even fry them)
Sometimes, perhaps even more often, the game and the insult are only
insinuated, for example, when someone calls you a name and you
respond simply by saying Your mother. (Note this game also explains a
scene in Style Wars-which made some of you laugh because you know the
cultural background, when one kid complains that another was talkin’
‘bout his mother.
The dozens, too, have become part of the wider culture. When my
son (who is white) went to elementary school here, he would sometimes
come home and say things like: “You’re mother’s so fat she needs her
own zip-code.”
Rappers don’t exactly play the dozens, but when they battle, they
also ritually insult one another. We will see a lot of that later.
Yet another African-American speech genre that reappears in rap
are the toasts. Toasts are rhymed folk-tales about various mythical folk-
heroes. The most famous ones are Staggolee, a gangster (who is
actually based on a real person), Shane who by his wit survived the
sinking of the Titanic, and-to me the most intersting one-the Signifying
Monkey (which apparently was brought to America by the slaves from
West-Africa); it may originally have been a Yoruba figure. The signifying
monkey always does one thing: he tells the lion that the elephant has
insulted him (the lion, or vice versa), which makes the lion get into a fight
with the elephant. He gets bruised and beaten and comes back to beat
up the monkey. Sometimes the monkey escapes onto the tree,
sometimes he gets beaten, but he always comes back to signify some
more: he just can’t repress his linguistic wit.
Page 4
The signifying monkey is an embodiment of the poor man’s values
and dreams: he is weak and only has his speaking skills to survive on,
and he uses it to play the powers of the jungle against one another.
These folk-tales also make a statement about how African-Americans see
their own culture-specific speaking skills: for, the lion’s problem is that he
does not realize that the monkey is only signifying-he takes him literally.
He is culture-blind. He does not understand that this is play. So if you said
to me “Your mother.” and I said in response: “Yes? What about her?”, I
would also demonstrate that I don’t know what signifying is.
[Signifying Monkey]
As for the toasts, some rap-pieces are constructed in a similar form;
As for signifying, you will find a lot of that-listen to Big Daddy Kane or
L.L. Cool J. (short for “Ladies love cool James). Or, if you want to know
more about signifying, you can also watch Eddie Murphy’s movies