Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [24]
THE WHITE NEGRO
Novelist Norman Mailer was one of the first to spot the vital links between blacks and whites that formed the basis of today’s informal American English. It was in 1957 when he spelled them out in the Fall issue of Dissent magazine in an article entitled “The White Negro.”
In New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, he wrote, white dissidents of the beat generation “came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marihuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. . . . The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”
Mailer himself was part of the white generations that grew up in the same early period and took to jazz and swing music so completely that they adopted much of the black lingual inflections as their own. He singled out the words man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, and square. “To swing with the rhythms of another is to enrich oneself,” he added.
THE HIP-HOP CRAZE
Amglish has also been strongly influenced by the hip-hop movement with its rapid-fire lyrics set to the sound of heavy drums. The rapper style sprang from folk poets of the Caribbean and West Africa as well as Cuban reggae and good old American jazz.
Hip-hop was born in New York in the late 1970s and soon developed a powerful crossover appeal, eventually drawing many more white fans than black. It also spread its own culture to other venues, such as break dancing, veejaying, deejaying (like a video or disk jockey emceeing an event), and a wide range of mostly baggy clothing styles.
With the help of many eager corporate sponsors like Nike, Coca-Cola, and Sprite, hip-hop was soon spreading around the country and the world on the wings of Music Television (MTV) and Hollywood films such as Wild Style, Breakin’, and Beat Street. Its international appeal was largely due to its rebellious nature and language, which drew enthusiastic support especially from dissident groups in other countries.
To this day, it is considered smart and cool for whites to mimic black vernacular. Among the more popular hip-hop terms have been boyz for gang members, chillin’ for acting cool, hood for neighborhood, and my bad for excuse me for fouling up.
Among the top artists have been Grandmaster Flash, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Queen Latifah, P. Diddy, the Wu Tang Clan, and the great white hope, Eminem. Hey man, know wha’m sayin’?
HIP-HOP LIT
Although hip-hop has not generated much literature, at least one rapper claims his “gangsta” novels with sexually explicit language have sold well. He is Renay Jackson, one of the stars interviewed by Spencer Michels on the Online NewsHour in 2003. Jackson, who worked as a custodian for the Oakland (CA) Police Department, claims that one of his novels, Oaktown Devil, sold 35,000 copies.16
In response to a question from Michels, Jackson said, “In this neighborhood, just like the majority of neighborhoods I describe in my books, you have, like, killings, you know, drug dealings—look at that—you know, just like the everyday life of, like, you know, the urban streets.” He says his audience is mostly young black males.
Michels also interviewed the publisher, Richard Grossinger, founder of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, CA. “When I got the books,” said Grossinger, “I thought that they were actually pretty wonderful. They were good stories, they were funny, they had great dialogue in them, and they had a quality of authenticity that you just couldn’t fake. I would say it would be disappointing to sell less than 50,000 of each of the books. And they could well sell up in the hundreds of thousands.”
INNOVATIVE LANGUAGE
Of all the