The Akan hiplife rap and the American hip hop rap, which uses the English language, may on the surface look alike in terms of rhythm. For example, Azigizar Jnr. believed he started rapping because “I was doing Grand Master Flash… I will be rapping to it; Curtis Blow and I would be rapping to it”. He explained that he would be constructing his Akan rap in line with the art of Grand Master Flash and Curtis Blow. K. K. Kabobo also revealed, “Because at that time I was enjoying U-Roy”, he constructed the Akan version of what he heard from U-Roy on the grounds that he at that time wanted to have a different kind of brand from the big names in Ghanaian highlife like Papa Yankson and Pat Thomas. For Reggie Rockstone, the English language was “what they spoke to me” at home and that was what got him into rap. He even believed he loved the English language to the extent of dreaming in it. These are the artistes who started the hiplife art on a commercial basis and they make you believe that hiplife rap is inspired by the English language or that the English language in the American rap can easily be restructured into Akan rap. Again, to meet the expectation of the listening public that hiplife is inspired by the American English language, some hiplife artistes like D-Black, Asem and
93 Trigmatic manage to simulate the American English accent on Akan words. However, the belief that hiplife is inspired by or follows the English language needs interrogation, especially considering the fact that rap, whether in English or in Akan, as a rhythmic art greatly relies on the syllable of the word. The study of the syllable as sound unit therefore gives us a conceptual framework to study sound not only in speech but also in rap.
The syllable as a phonic or phonemic unit has different phonological significances in different languages. A comparison of the way it functions in English and in Akan will help us understand whether the linguistic factors producing rhythm in English rap are the same as in Akan. This means that a clear distinction has to be made between the metrical structures of the two languages. According to Banti and Giannattasio (2004: 300), “phonological relevant units that undergo metrical regulation are not the same in all languages”, sometimes not even when they belong to the same family. The syllable as a phonological unit may constitute the stress as the key feature in English, the vowel length in Latin and the tone in most West African languages like Akan. In English, the concept of stress gives us loudness, duration and pitch. The word “pretend” as a verb has “pre” as unstressed and “tend” as the stressed. The stressed syllable is the louder, of longer duration and of higher pitch in contradistinction to the unstressed syllable “pre”. The concept of stress in the English language also has a grammatical
function, spelling out the difference between word classes as in “object” [“““bdjikt] as the noun form, “
the stress on the first syllable; [“bdjŒŒŒŒkt], as the verb form, the stress on the second syllable. Stress also
features prominently in the sentence in English. We could have contrastive stress as in “The pen is on the table”, that is, it is not under it. In short, stress in English is a key feature and therefore we call English a stress language.
94 The same syllabic concept however does not exist in the Akan language. The phonological sequence that constitutes the key feature in an Akan word like “papa” is not stress but tone, high or low, and it is that tonal structure that gives the meaning and sometimes the class of the word in Akan. For example,
the Akan pronunciation for father in English is [pàpá], the first syllable is a low tone and the second is
a high tone; the word for “good” is “papa” [pápá] in Akan, two syllables with high tones; the word for
“fan” is “papa” [pàpà], two syllables with low tones. Again, “bra” [brà] in Akan as a low tone
syllable is a verb form meaning “come” while “bra” as a high tone [brá] is a noun form meaning
“menstruation”. Unlike in the English language therefore, loudness, duration and pitch are determined by the Akan tonal structure. The Akan tonal structure, as seen above, also has semantico-grammatical functions just like the English stress. Clearly, before we even get into any serious analysis, we see that while the phonological sequence serving as the key feature in the English language is the stress, that of the Akan language serving as the key feature is the tone. Therefore, equating the Akan linguistic structures to those of the English language will be a measurement exercise with the wrong yardstick. The fact that the key features of Akan and English are drastically different constitutes the main dividing line between the performatory structures of the Akan rap and the US English rap. In the ensuing discussion, a lot more attention is paid to the dynamics of Akan rap but as we move along, we make the necessary reference to the US English rap.
This enquiry on localization of hiplife now moves away from the key features of the two languages and mainly hinges on the study of the Akan tone. This is the most phonologically relevant unit in Akan that undergoes metrical regulation, and is thus the main ingredient in verbal rhythmic construction in Akan rap. Looking at the Akan tone is the key to the relationship between poetry and music in this study.
95 In the Western literary tradition, a lot of work has been done with regards to the relationship between the spoken word, poetry and music, referred to in chapter two as a continuum. We have already cited the examples of poetical structures that produce musicality. There have been studies of syntactic parallelism in poetry (Jakobson, 1987: 117-266; Levin, 1962), how syntax constitutes the poetic line (Mitchell, 1970; Tarlinskaja, 1984), and constructing creativity through deviation of poetic forms from well-formedness (Peters, 1948; Brooke-Rose, 1958; Baker, 1967). An insightful discussion of particular relevance to this study, however, is that of Banti and Giannattasio. They refer to poetry as a special kind of “speech”, a poetic discourse, as opposed to ordinary speech or plain discourse, (Banti and Giannattasio, 2004: 306). They argue that the poetic discourse uses the “discourse-like features of music” like “musical phrases and periods, syntactic and strophic structures, refraining, punctuation markers such as breaths and rests, and so on upon which also the so-called pure, i.e, instrumental, music is mainly based in several cultures” (Banti and Giannattasio, 2004: 295). This, in addition to Levin’s concept of coupling (Levin, 1963: 140) which we referred to in chapter two, not only goes beyond the Western concept of poetic discourse but conveniently relates poetic discourse to instrumental music in all cultures. Levin’s ideas, on one hand, and those of Banti and Giannattasio, on the other, greatly inform the analysis of Akan rap poetry. Interrogation of the localization of hip hop in Ghana, hiplife, therefore goes beyond looking at the differences between the US English rap and the Akan rap for even though the Akan spoken word and the poetic word all depend on the tone, we still need to investigate the differences between them. The reason is that the tone of a syllable of a word in the spoken environment may not be the same as the syllable in the poetic environment. Such a study requires a good knowledge of the Akan tonal structure but the Akan tonal structure is such a huge topic and that we simply do not have enough space to cover every aspect of it. We will select only the
96 aspects of the Akan tonal structure that is germane to Akan rap. They are the Akan tone bearing unit, syllable type, high and low tones, downstepped high tone, downdrift and gliding pitches.