The sociolinguistics of hip-hop is hot right now, and Andrew Ross & Damian Rivers’ anthology is a welcome addition to advancing such scholarship. This collection of essays brings into powerful use the theoretical and methodological tools in sociolinguistics to analyse various languages and speech varieties.
The overarching themes that hold all of the chapters together are dissatisfaction and dissent. Steven Gilbers (ch. 2) does a focused analysis of Tupac Shakur's lyrics, focusing particularly on the phonological and lexical shifts between East Coast AAE and West Coast AAE as a result of his mobility and the honing of his hip-hop authenticity, and in particular how those shifts transformed his lyrical content and dissatisfaction and dissent. Leonie Wiemeyer & Steffen Schaub (ch. 3) demonstrate how in German rap dissent and dissatisfaction is tied to the performance of a critical voice through various lexical strategies and other linguistic strategies, such as direct referencing, posing rhetorical questions, juxtaposition, irony, and imitation, while Ross (ch. 4) demonstrates how Australian hip-hop artists dissent against the Australian government through political commentary.
Rivers’ fascinating chapter (ch. 5) takes us into the prejudicial minds of white nationalists and their racist perspectives on hip-hop, while in comparison Elina Westinen's work (ch. 6) on Finnish hip-hop artist Musta Barbaari opens up to the racial politics in that part of the world, exploring the multisemiotic constructions of self and new ethnicities. Gilbers (ch. 7) provides us with insight into how the hip-hop culture dealt with the financial crises of 2008. The author's sociolinguistic analysis demonstrates how hip-hop's dissent against materialism during this period suggest that contrary to the assumption that the culture embraced material goods more, in actuality hip-hop artists are less concerned with materialism and more critical of corporate greed. In ch. 8, Sender Dovchin demonstrates how Mongolian hip-hop artists perform dissatisfaction and dissent by voicing a progressive politics of social consciousness, and this is achieved through the mixing of vernacular speech and AAE fused into a local, yet global genre of rap and hip-hop.
A lot of ink has been spilled on Brazilian hip-hop, but in Marques do Nascimento's chapter (ch. 9) we find a strong sociolinguistic take on the intersection of language, coloniality, and the persistent racial hierarchy in Brazil. In that chapter, we read that language ideologies still perpetuate the colonial project but, as the author demonstrates, are challenged in the semiotic mobility and cultural and linguistic hybridity of Brazilian hip-hoppers. Marques do Nascimento demonstrates how rap continues to challenge ideologies of monolingualism, and that as a performance genre remains counter-hegemonic and a common language for indigenous voices advancing the fight against racial hierarchies and colonialism. In the final chapter, John P. Racine (ch. 10) takes a diachronic approach to the use of language in rap lyrics to demonstrate the importance of time in understanding where hip-hop comes from and where it is headed.
This book will be important for any sociolinguist interested in the study of hip-hop language or the sociolinguistics of hip-hop. The editors should be commended for completing an exciting compilation of essays.
