Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

72 Part 1: Language and Ideology
we can check this out to . . . all the way East kind of thing’ (Interview
12/12/03). This plan to gain sales in Middle Eastern countries such as
Saudi Arabia, however, was not so successful: ‘they didn’t want to play it
because it seems their censorship board does not allow songs that have
anything to do with praise Allah’. Meanwhile, with less strict rules of
what can and cannot be done in popular music, the song ‘gets great airplay’
in Malaysia. ‘People were blown away with the song. They never
thought a rap song would have Koran lyrics, Arabic lyrics’ (Interview
12/12/03). From rappers of Turkish background in Germany, such as
Islamic Force (see Kaya, 2001) to Malaysian Too Phat, from French bands
such as IAM to the verbal intifada of Palestinian rappers (Sling Shot Hip
Hop, 2008), it is possible to talk in terms of what Alim (2006) has called a
transglobal hiphop ummah (a global community of Islamic hip hop).
Lin (2009) suggests that the language of hip hop also makes possible connections
along class lines. MC Yan from Hong Kong uses predominantly
colloquial Cantonese (rather than common mixed Cantonese/English code),
especially the vulgar and largely taboo chou-hau. By defying the linguistic
taboos of mainstream middle-class society, Lin suggests, MC Yan communicates
his political message by linking Hong Kong slang and working class
defi ance with a broader translocally defi ant underclass through hip hop.
Meanwhile, MC Yan becomes part of other circuits of fl ow: Hong Kong DJ
Tommy’s compilation, ‘Respect for Da Chopstick Hip Hop’ – the title itself
a play on global (Respect/Da) and local (Chopstick Hip Hop) elements –
features MC Yan from Hong Kong, K-One, MC Ill and Jaguar all from
Japan, and Meta and Joosuc from Korea, with tracks sung in English,
Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. Such collaborations are common. Too
Phat’s 360°, for example, contains a track ‘6MC’s’, featuring Promoe of Loop
Troop (Sweden), Vandal of SMC (Canada), Freestyle (Brooklyn, New York)
and Weapon X (Melbourne, Australia): ‘From sea to sea, country to country/6
MC’s bring the delicacies/It’s a meeting of the minds to ease the turmoil/360
degrees around the earth’s soil’. Weapon X turns up again on Korean MC
Joosuc’s track Universal Language, in which Weapon X uses English and
Joosuc Korean (with some English). As DJ Jun explains, this track ‘is about
different languages but we are in the same culture which is hip hop. So language
difference doesn’t really matter. So hip hop is one language. That is
why it is called universal language’ (Interview, 02/11/03). From this perspective,
hip hop as a culture rises above different languages: The universal
language is not English; it is hip hop.
Languages Remixed
There is, then, a constant mixing, borrowing, shifting and sampling of
music, languages, lyrics and ideas. This can include borrowings and
imitations of African–American English, as in the Japanese group Rip