1887
A closer look at cultural difference
  • ISSN 1018-2101
  • E-ISSN: 2406-4238

Abstract

Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating one’s verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to “diss” his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participant’s performance generally consists of “freestyle” or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponent’s appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called “Eyedea.” I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, “R.K.” and “Shells”, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like “nigga” (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedea’s Whiteness largely in discursive ways – by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/prag.17.1.01cut
2007-01-01
2025-02-13
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Alim, Samy
    (forthcoming) Nation language in the African diaspora: Language use in contemporary African American expressive culture. In Arthur Spears (ed.) Black language – the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean: Education, History, Structure, and Use.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Beasty Boys
    (2004) Right here right now. To the 5 boroughsLP, 4June2004.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Blaze-Battle World Championship, HBO, New York City, November2 2000.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Boyd, Todd
    (2002) The new H.N.I.C. (Head Nigga in Charge): The death of civil rights and the reign of hip hop. New York: New York University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bucholtz, Mary
    (1995) Frm mulatta to mestiza. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge, pp.351-374.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Clark, John C
    (2002) Maintaining class and ethnic borders in a North American high school. Proceedings of II Simposio Internacional Bilingüismo, pp. 1525-1536. www.webs.uvigo.es/ssl/actas2002/08/01.%20John%20T.%Clark.pdf
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Cutler, Cecelia
    (2002) Crossing over: White youth, hip-hop, and African American English. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Linguistics Department, New York University.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Du Bois, W.E.B
    (1953) The souls of black folk. New York: Blue Heron.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Foytlin, Matt , Claire Nelson , Wali Rahman , and Jürgen Streeck
    (1999) Casualties of lyrical combat. SALSA No. 6 Proceedings of the sixth annual symposium about language and society – Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Goffman, Erving
    (1974) Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. (1981) Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Hall, Kira
    (1995) Lip service on the fantasy lines. InGender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. London: Routledge, pp. 183-216.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Irvine, Judith
    (2004) Losing one’s footing: Stance in a colonial encounter. Sociolinguistics Symposium 15. Newcastle upon Tyne, April 1-4, 2004.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Labov, William
    (1972) Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Kennedy, Randall
    (2002) Nigger: The strange career of a troublesome word. New York: Pantheon.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Kids
    (1995) Directed by Larry Clark. Excalibur Films.
  17. Rickford, John , and John Russell Rickford
    (2000) Spoken soul: The story of Black English. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Smitherman, Geneva
    (1994) Black talk: Words and prhases from the hood to the amen corner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Spears, Arthur
    (1998) Language use and so-called obscenity. In S. Mufwene , et al . (eds.), African-American English. New York: Routledge, pp. 226-250.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/prag.17.1.01cut
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Interculturality; MC battles; Ritual insults; Whiteness
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error