Talking About Words: Exporting English

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

Circa 625 AD, thought to be about the time Beowulf was composed.

Hip-Hop Hood

Bingo, Bango, Bongo,

I don't want to leave the Congo

(The harmonizing Andrews Sisters in 1947.)

Bling blang

Hammer with my hammer

Zingo zango

Cutting with my saw.

(A refrain from a children's song by Woody Guthrie.)

Bing bang, I saw the whole gang Dancing on my living room rug, yeah Flip flop, they was doing the bop All the teens had the dancing bug.

(Bobby Darin's " Splish Splash" of 1958.)

These little rhymes are full of playfulness, and an entire empire was later constructed around them: Hip-Hop Nation. Nowadays it's grown into the "Global Hip-Hop Hood," and the Hood has fostered a Hip-Hop Nation Language that is toyed with in foreign tongues in places as diverse as Bulgaria and Pakistan. One of the great things about the Internet is that it's open mike, 24/7, and nobody's in charge. So the power has come, at last, to the people: a revolution, the Chinese government fears, can be contemplated into a conspiracy with nothing much more than instant messaging. Hip-Hop is just a niche in the vast cavern of the network, but Hip-Hop is everywhere. A Japanese television program airs a segment called "B-Rap High School," and by tuning in people in faraway places with strange-sounding names (say, Ann Arbor) can hear songs by such groups as Rip Slyme or Orange Range. Sometimes things get lost in translation (or at least defeat the translation system Google provides), as in this from a Japanese teenager: "As for we the HIPHOP we love, B - the Rap preparatory school sees always pleasantly." With the Web, you can see for yourself how pleasant it is from anywhere. Hip-Hop lyrics play with words that echo. In English, the repetition of consonants is important; in Japanese, it's (mainly) the vowels. Some singing groups, Orange Range for instance, mix English and Japanese to get the best of both ways of rhyming. Their " Kumonbeibe DO THE Rokomo-shon," pays homage to Little Eva, who sang, "Come on, Baby, do the Locomotion" in her 1962 hit "The Locomotion." In Orange Range's version, the vocalists run a riff on the "oh" sounds for the Japanese audience of the 21st century. Here are the opening lines transliterated into English:

Ah ah

Ah ah Nanka Ii Kanji

Aozora Umi Dou? Kono Roke-shon

Ah ah

Ah ah Maji De Naisubadei

DO THE

Kumonbeibe DO THE Rokomo-shon

Ah ah Ah ah

Ah ah Rokoro-shon Ah ah Rokoro-shon …

(You can see the entire text at: http://www.tsnlife.com/jlyric/locorotion.html) A British performer, Dark-Druid, shows how a barrage of consonants is the key to the English style (full text is at http://www.rapsearch.com/board/t23239.html) Watch—as I get kinetic, this prophetic master of the frenetic poetics
Make you look pathetic & synthetic I'll smash your cosmetic aesthetic. Ick , ick, ick, ick, ick, ick, ick, ick. Hammer blows as regular as clockwork: the sure tick-tack of the metronome. The musician twisting the turntables back and forth in a Hip-Hop percussion section makes all things equal, just the job performed by the Anglo-Saxon scop who backed up his verses with a hand-held harp. “Hwæt, we Gār-Dena / in gēar dagum” That's the opening of the Old English epic Beowulf , with the accented syllables in bold face: "So! The Spear-Danes in days gone by." Hw æt! (rhymes with "cat"). What is the strong beat, and the repetition of stressed syllables at regular intervals (with varied numbers of unstressed syllables scattered among them) goes Hip-Hopping through 3,182 lines of verse. They echo in our ears from the distant past. ***

I am grateful to Rand Hutcheson and Donka Minkova for correcting an earlier  version of this quotation.