No
British genre better highlights the effects of globalisation than Grime music:
an amalgam of Garage, Jungle, Hip Hop and Dancehall which emerged from pirate
radio stations in East London in the early 2000s. Through Grime, the artists
(known as MCs), who are often youths from marginalised, multi-ethnic areas,
discuss the hardships of their upbringing.
I set out to analyse how Grime MCs addressed
and referred to other people in their lyrics, in the hope of understanding what
defined their interpersonal relationships: familiarity
(mutual knowledge of personal information), solidarity (mutual rights and obligations) or affect (mutual like or dislike).
I
extracted and coded 589 nominal address and reference terms from 27 Youtube
videos by six MCs: 2 from London, 2 from North England and 2 from Cardiff, with
approximately 100 terms per MC. All terms were coded for three categories: (1)
the addressee or referent (peer, police,
rival, friend, family, artist, female, or other; (2) the emotional context: negative,
positive, derogatory or neutral; (3) kinship (kinship, non-kinship or voluntary
kinship, meaning using a kinship term for someone who is not a blood relative,
such as using bro (‘brother’) to
refer to a friend.
106
different terms emerged, with the most frequent showing that all six MCs draw
on the same cultural influences. The first group of frequent terms is man, don, mandem, blud and brudda, which all have Jamaican Creole
roots. The second group are British or American English terms: fam, mum, and guys, while the third group of terms are affiliated with Hip-Hop: dawg, cuz, nigga.
Delving
deeper, I found that negativity was common in the MCs’ lyrics, as in “Blud, I’ll get physical for you”. In fact, of
130 address terms, only seven were non-negative. This is partly explained by
the tradition of boasting in Hip-Hop, where MCs use insults to win lyrical
battles against opponents. This negativity indicates that affect is not central to their relationships, but what about
familiarity and solidarity?
Voluntary
kinship terms were also frequent and, interestingly, were often used in
negative contexts, such as “Bury your
spleen fam”. Sociologists argue
that when we face instability, we create fictive ties with others to create a
safer world. MCs may therefore use kinship terms to address and refer to
non-family members to show that they belong to the Grime community. However, these
terms are simultaneously placed in a negative context so that the MCs can engage
in lyrical competitions of honour. Given that they use these terms for people
they do not know, familiarity doesn’t
seem to be the most defining feature of their relationships.
Every
MC had a slightly different style, with some drawing more on Jamaican Creole
terms whilst others focused on terms from Multicultural London English. MCs in
Cardiff were more likely to use British or American English terms, whereas
those from London included more Hip-Hop terms. However, there were also
nationwide patterns: for example, all six MCs used MLE terms like man and fam, and they addressed and referred to the same people, such as
rivals and the police. Even though MCs in the Grime community do not know one
another, or necessarily like one another, these patterns in their address and
reference system suggest that solidarity
is crucial for their interpersonal relationships. It signals that they are part
of a wider cultural in-group which unites adolescents from marginalised
multi-ethnic areas. I conceptualise this as an imagined community, in the sense
of Benedict Anderson (2006, Imagined
communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London:
Verso Books). The system certainly reflects hostility, hypermasculinity and
individual expression, but it is ultimately based on shared grievances that
come from their social neglect. The comradeship expressed in their lyrics allows
them to turn their negative experiences into a positive celebration of their
existence.
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Adams, Zoe (2018) "I don’t know why man’s calling me family all of a sudden”: Address and reference terms in grime music. Language and Communication 60: 11-27.
This summary was written by Zoe Adams
