In their historical analysis of “Pittsburghese,” Johnstone et al (2002) propose that representations of local speech function to mediate a “shared take” (Eckert 2003) on what constitutes authentically-local linguistic style. The present paper seeks to build on this scholarship by examining Hip Hop music as a site for constructing the spatial authenticity of linguistic, as well as social, practices. Specifically, we argue that the repeated use of certain linguistic features in “authenticating discourse” (Bucholtz 2003; Shenk 2007), whereby artists attempt to establish and emphasize their connection to place, indexically links the linguistic with the local. Thus spatialized, these features become part of an ideology which both enables and constrains the linguistic authentication of place identity.
We contextualize the linguistic analysis by discussing examples of spatial authentication taken from music associated with one Hip Hop “scene,” spanning the metropolitan area of Houston, Texas. The examples come from music produced by two popular local artists who have achieved national recognition. We discuss a discourse of distinctiveness in this music, whereby the artists anchor practices to place in constructing an image of the locally-authentic. Among such practices are the linguistic, including phonetic variation embedded in words and expressions which refer to social practices linked to a strong local orientation, such as “drank” and “swang” (i.e. “drink” and “swing”). Because these processes of authentication are embedded in music widely circulated and consumed locally, we argue that the potential is great for the production of shared ideas about what counts as authentically-local speech. Furthermore, we hypothesize that these shared representations of the local will register their effects on artists attempting to construct place-conscious personae. To evaluate this hypothesis, we present a case study of intra-artist phonetic variation.
The phonetic analysis examines variable lowering of /I/ before engma. This process was chosen based on its use in the authenticating discourses of popular local Hip Hop, as discussed above. All tokens where /I/ precedes engma were extracted, analyzed auditorily, and coded for lowering. The data come from two albums released by an artist from the metropolitan area in question. These particular albums, released under different stage names, prove well-suited to our task because they differ sharply along the dimension of local-orientedness. Whereas in one album, references to the local are rare, the other makes frequent mention of local practices and places. The phonetic analysis reveals that /I/-lowering strongly correlates with such authenticating discourse: The lowered variant, which is commonly implicated in lyrical representations of the local, occurs with much greater frequency in the album where place is frequently referenced. We suggest that this pattern of co-variation illustrates and provides evidence for an ideology which construes /I/-lowering as locally-authentic speech.
Our findings accord with recent insights from cultural studies regarding the significance of place in Hip Hop music (e.g. Forman 2004). It is precisely because place figures centrally into the aesthetic of popular Hip Hop that such music provides rich data for examining the reflexive relationship between spatial authentication and language ideology.