 Thanks very much, but you've come in quite good numbers. Just about to start. Sorry, that's fine. Okay, so as I mentioned last week, this week we have, this is our third visiting lecture, and this time we have a person from working within London, but working on all sorts of very interesting issues around language and health, especially in Africa. But today, Professor Tope Omoni, who is from Rohampton University, where he is a professor of social linguistics and also runs a language, a centre of language research, will be talking about something he said he hasn't been doing for a while, which is talking about issues around religion, language and hip-hop music. He'll probably talk for about 40-45 minutes, but it would be really good if we could have a few questions afterwards. So think about what you might want to ask. Over to you. Alright, thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to show us. It's always good to come back here. It's almost become like a second home or second base for me in London. So, yes, I haven't spoken or talked hip-hop now for about four years. Four years? Four years to a gathering such as this. I've done the old conference paper or so outside of the UK. So this is a welcome return to something that I was a little bit passionate about. But I think I'll begin with the disclaimer. I was watching an interview of Denzel Washington. This must be about a decade ago. You think back a decade ago. Where were you? What were you doing ten years ago? Yes? And Denzel Washington on that interview was asked whether he regretted the fact that he went into film rather than hip-hop. And at that point he was just turning 50, I think, if I recall correctly, on the verge of 50. And he said, well, no, he was comfortable where he was at. That as an actor, the future was still his. But there weren't that many 50-year-old rappers around the place. And it was so humorous back then. I thought about it then. And wondered, where are the 50-year-old rappers that are still on stage anywhere if they're not dead at 25 or 30? They're retired, retired at maybe 35 or 40. So that made quite some sense. So when you think about me now having hit 60 and now standing and talking about hip-hop, who was that 60-year-old man doing talking hip-hop? What does he know? Hip-hop has outgrown me. So some of the things that you're likely to hear this morning are also things that are maybe a little bit dated. But I'm going to try and make it as current as possible. Essentially what I want to do is to explore only hip-hop because we're all used to hip-hop. Hip-hop is the conventional. So when you use an adjective like that or pre-modification as those of you in linguistics would understand, only pre-modifies hip-hop. That means that this is a kind of hip-hop. As soon as you pre-modify, it's not the mainstream because the mainstream does not need pre-modification. So this is a kind of hip-hop. What I'm claiming is that there's a consequence of cultural transformative and hybridizing processes. Cultural transformative, what does that mean? What does that mean? Cultural change, social change, shift or shift, hybridizing the coming together of cultures. Now the cultures that are coming together, as far as holy hip-hop is concerned, are secular cultures and religious cultures. Secular cultures and religious cultures. But secular cultures, these are our social normal, everyday things that we do, things of the world that we do. So those are getting mixed with religious culture. And in language, because we are students of language, we see how religious language takes on secular values and vice versa, vice versa. So holy hip-hop as an aspect of socio-cultural change, there's this book from 2010. It's an edited volume in the SLR sub-field. SLR stands for Sociology of Language and Religion. The Sociology of Language and Religion changed conflict and accommodation. And it's in this book that I first set out holy hip-hop as a field of inquiry and the ways in which it differs from hip-hop as we know it. So I'm going to talk a little bit about hybridity and globalization. I've been told not to make this too theoretical so that you can enjoy because it's fun. This is a fun area. I'll tell you how I came into researching this. I loved hip-hop music and still do to some extent. And spent a huge chunk of my salary buying CDs and stuff like that. That people felt was ridiculous amounts of money doing that. And when I calculated over the course of six months how much I had spent on this love of mine at the time, I decided it was necessary to get, apart from the enjoyment of the music, it was necessary to get something else out of it. So that's when I began to think more seriously about what it can add in terms of quality to my scholarship, my research. So I would attempt to define and theorize what it is and then the kind of methodology that you use in this field, this area, and then a little bit data as well. Hip-hop studies. This is something that you find in cultural studies you find it in sociology, you find it in religious studies now, religion and hip-hop. So there are several disciplinary areas that are interested in hip-hop. That's why we say it's multidisciplinary. But it is also interdisciplinary when you think about the theoretical frameworks that are used in engaging with issues around hip-hop. So it's possible, and as you will find, some of the references that I have here are not people in linguistic studies. So Homi Baba, for example, is from cultural studies and sociology. So they draw on multiple theoretical frameworks within different disciplines. And that's the justification we have for that. Okay, between sacred and secular negotiation and appropriation, the title that we started with, if I just double back, between JC and Jay-Z, what do you think JC stands for? Anyone? Jesus Christ. Absolutely, that's obvious. Yes, between Jesus Christ and Jay-Z. Now, a lot of people would not say the two things, hip-hop and Christianity or JC and Jay-Z, in the same synthetic string. Because the one is sacred and the other is secular. The one is sacred and the other is secular. But what we're saying now is there is actually some kind of towing and throwing going on between the sacred and the secular. Okay, some kind of negotiation. And resources of the sacred are being appropriated in the secular and resources of the sacred are being appropriated in the secular. So both ways. So if you think about Kanye West, for example, there are some songs that he has done where he has some religious references and he mentions Jesus. Does that make his music holy hip-hop? No, he's doing conventional hip-hop, but he's drawing on some of the resources of the sacred. Because in some of those songs he still uses what you might describe or refer to as swear words. Transnational cultural events as a framework. So in other words, we can also look at these negotiations and appropriations that we're talking about from the point of view of beyond the nation state boundary, cultural events that bring together people from different national backgrounds or national contexts. So when you talk of the Grammys, for example, the Grammys bring together artists from different parts of the world. So there are British artists there, French artists, there are German artists, there are US artists who are all there at the Grammys. Okay? So these kinds of events, this is just music. Of course in film, Hollywood, the globe, and other award ceremonies that you have, quite a lot of those entail or involve cross-border movements of culture and of practitioners of culture, those people. And I've just cited, again, 2006, that's 11 years ago. These were the groups that I became interested in at the time, and Thais who were performing at the Excel Center at the time and had to go and try and watch them. And now I've got a PhD student who is researching Polish transnational hip-hop artists who are going back and forth between London and Warsaw, performing here and performing there. And they have fans who travel with them who go and watch their shows and all of those. And there are issues of identity. So the negotiation that we talked about is not just negotiating trading cultures, but also how identities shift when these movements occur. Okay. I skipped that. Several confluences, meeting points, cultural in-betweens. In-betweeners, yeah, in-betweeners. So it's neither there nor there. They're in-between. And this is the hallmark of the base claim of Homi Baba's the location of culture from 1994. And his definition of what hybridity is. In social linguistics, we have since tapped into that. And so people talk about third culture. Yes, they talk about third culture, which is hybrid. Hybrid form. More recently, in traditional social linguistics, people would talk about code switching in-between A and B. And now they talk about trans-languaging. They say, well, it's not moving between A and B. It's actually one kind of code which has elements from both of these. So trans-languaging would, in some peoples conceptualization, would show elements of hybridization or hybridity. The idea that you have all of these people who subscribe to hip-hop and recognizing hip-hop as a culture. Hip-hop is a way of life. It's a view, a world view. So they refer to the hip-hop nation. And the hip-hop nation is such that it doesn't recognize the territorial boundaries that we have or the United Nations. So whether in Japan or in Malaysia or in London or in Johannesburg in South Africa or in Brooklyn, that membership is recognized of that community. I think in linguistics, some people would also say maybe that's a discourse community or they might call it a community of practice depending on what angle they were coming at. So that nation has a language. That nation has language. And that's a way that hip-hop artists talk. They have some registers that we associate with them. We recognize them by. So if you, for example, have, and it's not exclusive to them now because it has permeated the social scene. So you have a lot of people go, yo, yo, what's up? Yo, what's up? I don't know how they do those fingers. Is there anybody here? Yeah? Okay. So I told you there are better hip-hopers here. All right, good. So they have all those things and they have meanings. So the language. I also want to mention that the language is not just in the oral. It's also, in a broad sense, couture. Couture, the culture. It's a language. It's an expressive code. How they dress. I'm convinced that I am past myself by date as a hip-hop person. But I thought I'll show you. So in the past I've had bandana and some of the things on my grills and my teeth. But you can see my gray hair now. That would really look ridiculous. So you're not allowed to laugh. Okay. So I have a bling. Yes? Bling. Blinged up. Aha. Now that's part of the paraphernalia of membership in that community. Yes? Part of the paraphernalia. Because I'm talking holy hip-hop, what I've got there is a cross. Yes? I've got a cross. Then I've got something from Judaism. There as well. Okay. Glossolalia. I don't know how many of you have heard this time before. Glossolalia. Right. Okay. This was something that was in social linguistics literature in 1971. Where were you in 1971? Okay. So Samaritan. Yes? Samaritan in 1971 coined that. And it's what we call in modern day parlance speaking in tongues. Do you know speaking in tongues? Yes? Evangelical Christians speak in tongues. That's what Samaritan called glossolalia at that time. And he claimed or people have claimed that it is possible to do a phonological analysis of glossolalia and be able to tell what it is that it sounds something like this. Glossolalia. That's speaking in tongues. Now when you record that and then you try and do a phonologue, I'm not convinced that the thoughts in my mind or in my head, as I said what I just said, that an analysis by a sociolinguist will expose what I have just said and then you try and do a phonologue. I'm not convinced that a sociolinguist will expose what I have just thought and prayed about in that. But as a scholar I would not foreclose it but it's intriguing. Yes? It is intriguing. Now access to that is like access to the language that hip-hop artists also use. Because if you're not used to the code then you might exactly you might not really be able to decode what's going on but the nation knows it. And one of the one of the proponents of the existence of this nation hip-hop nation is Alim Sami who operates out of Stanford University in the United States. Globalization of religion uses the same conduits the same channels and tools as the globalization of culture. The globalization of culture is about flow. Yeah? So if religion is flowing through the same conduits as culture then we can understand how hybridity may be inevitable. Yes? Maybe inevitable. It's like crawling through a tube whether you're a good guy if you both crawl through the same tube whatever coloring is in the inside of that tube when you surface on the other side both of you would have evidence of having come through that tube. Yeah? Okay. Emergence of multiple centers and alternative narratives. Now a lot of people tell a story because hip-hop is about telling stories. But the story or the narrative the mainstream narrative is that this is an American form is something that grew out of America out of Brooklyn but today we have multiple centers or there's a debate that there are other centers apart from the American story. Now that's a book that we use in sociolinguistics the ethnography of communication that is edited by Del Himes and John Gumpers. Do you know that book? Gumpers and Himes? No? Okay. Check it out. Directions in sociolinguistics ethnography of communication is a useful book. And in that book there is a chapter on Turkish adolescents verbal drooling verbal drooling verbal drooling and when I read that article or that chapter I had no clue this is so long ago I had no clue what hip-hop was was not big deal then but already Gumpers and Himes had a chapter on Turkish adolescents verbal drooling is two opponents who face each other and they use poetry to insult one another so I would insult you and your take up must rhyme with something that I have maybe the last word or something like that and if it doesn't then you have lost the battle and it goes back and forth like that. So Turkish adolescents were doing verbal drooling before hip-hop battles became known so do we want to say that the Turkish adolescents learnt it from the US no they didn't are there any Turkish people here I saw you smiling I guessed yes do you recognize this verbal drooling thing absolutely but from what I got that girls don't do it or do girls do it now girls do not do it it's a boys thing so there was the verbal drooling so that's one example of why we need to think about this multiple centers rather than a US narrative so the alternative narratives Dara Ji that's the Senegalese group that was famous in the 90s not so much these days and they did an album which had one song in it that they called the boomerang and that was an alternative a narrative to you know what the boomerang is when you throw the boomerang it goes away and then it comes back to you so what they claimed was that this thing that you are ascribing to the US actually was born in Africa this out of the tradition of the grill you know the storytelling practice or culture on the west African coast and and it went with the middle passage the middle passage is about slavery so when slavery happened they took their storytelling narratives on their storytelling practices with them to the plantations and this was what they entertained themselves with over time now so they said storytelling started here it went with the middle passage to America and it has come back home so when you talk about Dara Ji at that point they said well no we are not copying America we are doing something that we've always done we had it we sent it off and it's not come back to us so it's ours we're not borrowing okay so I explained at the beginning talking about the modification that Holy Hippo was a subgenre some people would describe it as alternative Hippo open to contestation it is defined by the community of practice who are the people who do Holy Hippo Pentecostals Pentecostals in Christianity but you also have Muslim Hippo you have Muslim Hippo at the time that I was working on entice and one or two other people there was a group out of Birmingham or Manchester they were called Mecca to Medina Mecca to Medina they were in the language of Hippo badass rappers they were badass rappers I had to say that because we need to realize that it's not just in Christianity that you have Holy Hippo and now online if you go on Google YouTube you will find Hippo rappers have uploaded things in other religions of the world in other religions of the world so Buddhism or Buddhist rap in YouTube Taoists Hinduism all of these ones also have raps that you can go and have a taste of now so even though it's practiced by this group it has the core elements of what David taught called hip-hop in those days so they say well these are the elements I'm saying break dancing tagging is graffiti yes and what Africa Bambaata called over standing what do you think over standing means anybody no but you know understanding so understanding this is one step ahead of Bambaata claims it is not sufficient in the resistance struggle because hip-hop was quite often in the early days associated with resistance it was revolutionary it was not enough to just understand if you just understand then they could have you the authorities could have you the powers that they could have you so as a hip-hop culture person you have always to be one step ahead of the system and that's what he termed over standing you know where they're coming from you're ahead of the game over standing okay one more thing to explain about about holy hip-hop you know in in our secular world somebody says something to you say I don't believe you okay show me yes I don't believe you show me in other words if you show me then I might believe you so seeing is believing seeing is believing in our secular world but in the world of the Pentecostals believing is seeing it's a reversal believing is seeing so if you're operating from seeing is believing in holy hip-hop you're operating from believing is seeing so you can already begin to see that there are separations or differences within the household of hip-hop another thing whereas in conventional hip-hop people regard it as a way of life yes is the way they talk is the way they dress is the way they walk all of that so it's an end in itself yes hip-hop is an end in itself it's a real life in holy hip-hop it is a means to an end how am I doing okay it's a means to an end holy hip-hop is a means to an end and I explain what I mean by that see for your generation a lot of people became disenchanted with religion yes people became disenchanted with religion why would I why would I go to church why would I want to go to the mosque why why should I be religious when it's going to mean that I can't I can't listen to good music I can't dance to good music I can't do all these other things I can't dress in a hip fashion so holy hip-hop takes control of that situation and so the same baggy pants that you find in conventional hip-hop you find the religious hip-hoppers or the holy hip-hoppers they dress in their baggy pants in their baggy t-shirts in their baseball hats they dress the same way they wear blinks as well as I've mentioned but the purpose is to bring back your generation into the fold bring back your generation into the religious fold the religious community and boy I think to a large extent it has worked I think it has worked because suddenly you have this good music yeah well, why do I need Jay-Z's music when I have Governor B singing this beautiful Ryan's okay now at the time that I was doing this I have a friend or I had a friend an American who settled in Britain and worked part-time on what you might describe as a pirate radio station a pirate radio station doing hip-hop on that but religious hip-hop it is of mixed race and it was fascinating discussing hybridity with him because we went through a period in cultural analysis when mixed race people were described as half cast yes or mulatu half cast means full cast and so the critique of that is that it's not politically correct to describe mixed race people as that the biracial belonging to two races or dual heritage persons so this came to replace that and the way that they dealt with hybridity within that discourse becomes a point of reference for us in thinking about hybridity in relation to holy hip-hop as well and these mixes that I talked about of course the fact that they tag some as politically correct or incorrect suggests that you have tension and friction in that analysis and those come from conflict within the constituent identities religion or the sacred and the secular as I said the one things that you would have the same syntax train but suddenly through holy hip-hop here we are actually mixing elements off of this now the framework within which we notice or observe these tensions and frictions is what I describe as the center periphery so the center is the mainstream and the periphery is the alternative and hence was the alternative so holy hip-hop is the alternative conventional hip-hop is the mainstream that's the center so that's where the negotiation between that center and you know what that negotiation is a successful one because at that time too yes holy hip-hop or people have another name because it's not just hip-hop religious music generally escapes my memory now was not an award category in the mobile it was not recognized as an award category the Grammys didn't recognize that as an award category but today they actually recognize and acknowledge these forms of expression and that means the conversation or the negotiation that we mentioned earlier has been successful so well what used to be alternative is now mainstream as in you find them being equally acknowledged and recognized on the Grammy platform on the Grammy platform Center periphery Barack Obama at the time he was president he's no longer president now so let us dwell just a little bit on these two secularization when the base register is sacred and a deliberate process is put in place to modify it to the everyday that's secularization so you're starting out from a base register that is sacred it's holy religious you secularize by turning down the religious content or you use the religious material or element for the everyday and in secularization when the base register is secular it's secular and then religious after that so if you find a Pentecostal rapper who will say yo for example that base register is secular yo is is secular but in talking to a brother a religious brother in that context that's secularization so yo is not the secular word it takes on a new meaning a different meaning in that context of course there are issues around ratio in the mix how much of the secular are used in the sacred and how much of the sacred are used briefly you find in the literature hippopography and so on and so forth the way of life we've mentioned ethnography is this method ethnography means you enter the community that you're studying and you work with them g-force if I just quickly use that as an example when I first heard about g-force they were struggling they had just formed nobody knew anything about them and then they put an album out and so I wrote emails back and forth I interviewed them by email they never caught me to actually meet them in person because they were readily available within a couple of hours of sending an email to them they were right back to me and I was just satisfied with that and then they released an album and in the blinking of an eye they had a management team around them they were nominated for the mobile awards and then I wrote to them to say I'd like a meeting and I never, up until this day I never got a I never got a response and then I wrote to the management team I never got a response so make hay why the sun shines never live until tomorrow what you can do today I wish that I had met them and established a rapport before they became because suddenly fame came and they became intersexable so ethnography it means you have to be working very closely and watching them within that friend of a friend this is an approach that Leslie Milroy premiered in or used in her Belfast study in 1987 Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland being at notions of community and identity within that and language use concerts, observation so I mentioned my PhD student earlier he's gone to so many of this and then I ask him where are your chapters and he says I'm still collecting you've collected enough data I think you're beginning to enjoy these concerts more than the PhD that you're doing so observation interviews, interviewing the artists themselves either through writing or actually meeting with them and recording those media you have all these websites only hiphop.com where you can Muslim hiphop.com where you can download materials commentaries and so on that people have used so Kimba my friend that I mentioned who had worked in the Paris radio station his street name so even though he was a holy hiphop person they also have street names and his name was DJ Clarity yes DJ Clarity G-Force I've just mentioned The Truth, Grammy Awards nominee 2008, Blackstone reference to the CARBA baby Muslims that was another London group at the time baby Muslims, the youth the focus of the ministry this was fascinating fascinating because when you saw young Muslims in their late teenage in 1819 who were doing this a lot of other teenagers wanted to be part of this this was the thing I was referring to about bringing you back into the community into Mecca to Medina it's a journey okay so I ask Clarity what's what's this about your mom was you Kimba but your Clarity as far as everybody on the street is concerned and he said well Clarity came as a vision this was his response to me Clarity came as a vision and vision is a religious thing not exclusively yes we associate tend to associate vision with religion Governor Bee so this is a quote from some source is setting the urban music scene with Holy Ghost Fire Holy Ghost Fire so you can see the discourse the language of religion in there and Governor being an acronym for God's unique vessel now assigned that's what Governor means yes God's unique vessel now assigned but when you look that it actually looks like the governor of a place Kingdom child okay so I used I mentioned the Turkish thing earlier so battling was already happening long ago in some cultures the 100k battle was something that Clarity participated in and this this is a transcript of him it's your boy Clarity Kimba aka Paradise Skills you can see the religious references Paradise Skills listen I don't rap I revelate so they don't call themselves rappers they say they're revelators the book of revelation people who reveal that which you don't know yet cause word play is for artists but I was told prophets produce the artists do you see the tension as in I am one step ahead or one ledge above the rappers conventional rappers one step or one ledge above them use of bridging establishes link between Clarity the holy hip hopper and the community of rappers through his participation because the 100k battle was not something that only the holy hip hoppers were doing conventional hip hoppers were involved in that so by mixing with them and working with them that located them in that community of practice and it's a test of skill it's a regular thing that's what Lavi and Venga tell us about community of practice yes and they improve as a reason as a consequence of that and in the street setting of the battle where the contextualization where is it happening in line with subgenre practice in holy hip hop Clarity articulates a divergent identity away from the secular to the sacred through invoking paradise so he said he's got paradise skills the revelation and profit register analysis makes it possible for you to identify how he really does the separation register analysis reaffirmation of the distinction between conventional hip hoppers and those who explore hip hop for a religious end so you might call all of us hip hoppers but we have different objectives the religious ones are doing it you know as a means to an end and that end is going to heaven getting as many people to heaven as possible whereas the conventional is for being they're all sample sampling is something that hip hoppers do a lot it's just that with holy hip hoppers a lot of sampling that they do come from religious sources so Clarity's rare jewels album or song samples from Psalm 23 verse 4 yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I stay composed no fear complex so he's taking Psalm 23 and turn that into into rhyme though amongst gritty streets lost souls and petty beef I ready heat from my pen on a blank sheet my rap fit is a track meat taking battens from the crippled and weak taking battens from the crippled and weak so what's that taking battens from the crippled and weak you're assisting you're healing them giving them energy that Jesus was healing all those crippled and weak people that's what he sees himself as a prophet he talked about vision Clarity mixes the sound reference with the traditional hip hop idea of gritty streets of petty beefs so we've got a beef so he's using some of the codes of conventional secular hip hop we've got a beef and track meats athletics takes the battens from the crippled and the weak rise up and walk for those of you who are used to that literature the cripple Jesus takes the steak or whatever it was so he says rise up and walk go does the taxes need a holy secular or sacred but somewhere in between that's the hybridity we were talking about space now we mentioned Holy Baba before in social linguistics Rakesh Bhatt has done work on this notion of the third space this hybridity thing and it goes on like that because I've gone beyond my 40 minutes now I'll just finish Couture and other signifying codes the hijab controversy and hip hop's liberal fashion selective adoption or adaptation so the tension and the friction that we talked about you can see them so how do you do Holy Hip Hop when in convention or conventional society we have these debates going on in some places about the hijab different culture so that's religious culture and that's secular culture a secular culture is about hip hop Holy Hip Hop says well I'm hip hop too but I have these other cultures that you don't subscribe to adoption and adaptation religious blinks I showed you that at the big crucifixes Crescent's and Star of David this you can go there and see Holy Hip Hop ministry music is actually an established ministry in religion in Christianity there are people in the church whose business is the music ministry and they use music to minister yes they use music to minister so within that arrangement that's where Holy Hip Hop would be located they are in the music ministry yes in the music ministry welcome to HolyHipHop.com our mission since 1997 is to take the gospel to the streets take the gospel to the streets take the gospel to the streets through the global proliferation of spirituality enlightening Holy Hip Hop ministry music and entertainment glorifying Christ you see the objective it's plain unclearly stated so when I talk about it means to an end this is it we appreciate you visiting us thank you for your prayers support and God bless and then they put Psalm 146 verse 10 they never lose sight of the religious this is what Psalm 146 10 says the Lord shall reign forever even thy God O Zion unto all generations praise ye the Lord so there is a religious lesson that's a doctrine that's included there so you realize that the music is not the beat end all there's something beyond that the boomerang hypothesis suggests that the hip hop had little or no link to either Christianity or Islam yes that's what the boomerang hypothesis was because the storytelling practice of the grave of that time that was not religion based in fact Christianity history will show that Christianity was not there yet yes Christianity hadn't arrived applicability of social linguistics and discourse analysis tools from some of the things that I have said you can see I kept referring to social linguistics I talked about register analysis textual analysis in some of the things that we mentioned with reference to ratio variation in holy hip hop can we talk of a continuum is it possible that something which you have a circular there and a sacred there and that you can have points between the two of how much secular or how much sacred it is instead of using binary distinction one thing is happening in social linguistics scholarship or in scholarship generally a lot of people are moving away from the binary so nothing is that or that there are all those middle points you know that it's not exactly not exactly no statistics it is worth checking to establish the effect of holy hip hop on youth population for each faith so you can actually introduce statistics you can introduce statistics into your textual analysis as well by looking at the kind of codes that I used Sefini thank you 45 minutes because we started a bit late thank you very much for quite a fascinating talk that deals with a whole range of issues that goes way beyond just language or English but before I open for questions I think I'd like to quickly get into before the rest of the group starts and I put to you perhaps a rather radical statement and that would be would hip hop and the let's say the influence of hip hop have been possible without English the spread of hip hop what you've shown is quite clearly so if it weren't for English would we have what we've got now that's a very difficult question then but as as an indigenous language loyalist I would say yes so the Turkish thing that I mentioned earlier as long as we can establish that that Turkish culture you know existed independent of English it means that that aspect of hip hop culture so didn't need English too now if you're meaning would it be as elaborate or as big as it is now I'm not sure I know that in Nigeria for example there are a lot of a lot of people doing rap in local languages and doing rap in Pigeon English and Pigeon English is not English it's a language that's not indigenous to here it's indigenous to those parts of the world so in that sense the fact that they produce those songs there there is hip hop culture there and some of that then travels out into the west I'm thinking well globalization of culture and its flow inflow outflow will happen as a consequence of the forces of globalization anyway I'm not able to categorically dismiss the size of the enterprise I can't I can't but I think that something is there that may have emblazoned but may be further assisted by the existence of English hip hop in these other parts of the world and there were quite a number of artists in different parts of the world who started out by actually mimicking American which is why so freaky I think that's one word that I got out of I don't know now whether 2003 but sometime in the 2000s a paper that he did and he was talking about Japanese Japanese and they're taking the English word and is there any Japanese person here no Japanese no freaky so freaky becomes freaky yes in Japanese hip hop in Japanese rap but we also have elements of other languages in English as we all know let me say something I came here today praying and hoping that you would not be quiet and silent now you've got to give me something I've given you something so I'm expecting something in return I said to my students and I talked to them like this I think I know but from the questions that they ask me they let me know that I really don't know that's what I'm expecting good yes how do I think hip hop would develop in the future because it's a it's a multi-million dollar business people begin to make a distinction between commercial hip hop and real hip hop yes real hip hop now my issue is if you do real hip hop you still need your daily bread yes you still need your daily bread so it's not possible to do away with commercial hip hop and because of the way that the entertainment industry works yes quite a lot of people who probably started out holy hip hop or holy music church music and we have a few examples like that Whitney Houston you all know Whitney Houston you've heard the name Whitney Houston and she started off singing in church and there are lots of people like that before she became the popular entertainer yeah as far as hip hop is concerned I have a feeling that the holy hip hop brand across religions will grow some more will grow some more maybe at some point because we're always constructing and deconstructing so people go into religion they come out of religion maybe they go back into it again so it's an off and on it's an off and on thing the ones who are managing the business exactly what they're looking for and if one person is not playing ball anymore then they look for somebody else who will play who will play ball the involvement of hip hop in politics is another dimension to that so where would hip hop go if the next prime minister is a rapper in Britain I see you all smiling how can that ever happen who what about what happened in America so it can't happen anything can happen so you mix commerce with politics with an aspect of culture you can't cap it it's kind of difficult to say this is how fight will go or it's gonna die hybridity it's kind of sacred forming into it's own kind of just like American vernacular more precisely the hip hop English that we see particularly in American society and in British society if I just try and tease out something here American vernacular English is the language of a community of a group in some literature they actually call that ebonics yes so it's expressive of a particular culture expressive of a particular culture it conveys that culture it represents those people the people who do holy hip hop here do their holy hip hop in the language of here dialect of here but that's the same thing that you have in UK rock yes UK rock music people do their rock music as UK artists in the language of here now there's no gain saying the fact that they have also done research and seen elements of American English or Americanization in the language that artists use in this place from time to time but not in a sustained way yes so the flow the linguistic flow or the language flow will always be there because of the that believe you know that hip hop started there that's the home that's the holy grail of hip hop so young persons just starting out who are looking for their own identity searching for it might take that but as they get established they come to realize I really don't need to sound American to move this because in fact there are a lot of British artists who go across the Atlantic and have become really popular Adele for instance she's the doyen of America they love her to bits in the place but she never tries to speak American she speaks British English when she's there in fact London yes that's what Adele does because then that becomes the identity of the brand that she's carrying yeah so you might find mixes here and there between the different dialects that we have but the essence and we try to run away from essence because there is no essence as far as identity is concerned we constantly say this it's constructed so I probably would sound more American if I wanted to create a certain and I would say this for those of us who came to the English language as a second language you know postcolonial context I find that when I go to America after three or four days with my American friends I sound more American and when I come back to Britain with my British friends after three or four days I sound more British you know so we're constantly doing this stuff because it's a reflection of the community that we're engaging with I don't know whether that of the sacred and the secular yes oh I see what you're saying I see what you're saying so like trans-languaging the example that I gave you remember I said with code switching you have language A and language B yes two distinct languages and then we take elements of A and we insert into it and say ah okay you're code switching you're going from A into B but current scholarship now out of the US and out of here people are talking about trans-languaging and say well it's not about A and B but it's about code that has its own and people use it you're not moving between languages you're just used this is all you know yes this is all you know now so yes it is possible that part of language change or social change in the long term might mean that when somebody gets on the rostrum on the platform they come out in a particular kind of code that people then recognize as because right now we were just saying it's mixing the secular and the sacred or mixing the sacred and the secular that's because it's in the process of becoming but it's always in the process of becoming because even the American and trans-languaging this is referenced to a point in time who knows what the theoreticians will be saying for the next five years it took all that from the 70s people talking code switching until now only about a few years back they start talking about trans-languaging so it's taking a while scholarship is like that it keeps changing so it is possible that holy hip-hop may become associated with a defined defined code an element of dynamism an element of dynamism it's not static nothing is static I like the fact that you use the word audience Alain Bell talks about what he calls audience design in sociolinguistics we talk about recipient design recipient design that is something we constantly do we tailor the way we talk the things we say or talk about according to the audience that we have yes? so does Kanye West tailor the way that he that he sings or speaks according to a particular audience that he probably does depending on what he wants to do with the particular album but I would think more along the lines of people who use music to make ideological commentary or statements yes? to teach people something on idea on ideology so they would use the language that the targeted audience can understand the code that they can understand I'll give you an example because we were talking about Ebola just before we came into class when Ebola happened in 2014 there was a replay of 1985 Sa is this Sa now or Lord Bob Galdorf is this Sa or Lord do you know Bob Galdorf? Sa Galdorf rallied the artist together to do a rehash of 1985 the song that they did for the Ethiopian farming at that point to help the Ebola victims but these were all mostly western artists all singing in English but before they did that on the west African coast in the countries that were concerned or affected by Ebola they had also rallied and got together a group of local artists who sang using multilingual resources they sang using multilingual resources so they had English they had French they had Walloff all these other languages on the coast there and then there was a debate and the debate was the magnitude of what Sa Galdorf put together was global that was big but the resources that these guys on the ground on the west African coast had was limited but in terms of penetration they reached more people those local artists reached more people than the big global and some people call that a charade they said it was a charade now because what the Ebola public health authorities wanted to do was to teach the people the local people how not to get infected by Ebola and so they chose the languages of the people so this is in reference to your audience design and that was successful to a large extent because it cut down the number of infections drastically they didn't make money it was not for the purpose of making money that was an ideological thing that they were doing at the point in time so to go back to America and go back to Kanye West I don't know what drives I was wondering this a couple of days ago just softened the net because when Hillary Clinton was running for president they had a selfie of a Kanye what's her name? Kim Kardashian and Hillary like that all three of them and then when the inauguration was about to happen there was this news that was going around that Kanye was getting invited to come and perform at President Trump's inauguration and I said I can't reconcile the two things how do you take a selfie with one candidate and then you go and do for another one he didn't add up so in terms of this commercial thing he probably saw that I don't have confirmation for it but he probably saw that as a good platform to get into the new regime since I was clear that Hillary was not going anywhere I can get into the new regime I do the show for free for Trump so the audience might be something that they have in mind if people put songs together for teenage girls they would use the language that teenage girls understand and that they can reconcile to so audience, yes, audience design is an important thing it's something that is well worth researching or investigating to establish whether really and in order to do that your strategy would be interviewing you would have to interview artists to get them to respond to you so is this part of your consideration when you do the packaging of your music, do you think about the audience in terms of selecting the language that you use yeah okay thank you very much for the brave souls who asked the question so for our next speaker which will be in early March I'm sure you can come up with a few more questions as well I'd like to thank you again very much for your very interesting talk thank you that is actually much more than just looking at English