Raaga V. Rajagopala
Robyn Rihanna Fenty is nothing short of a contemporary celebrity icon. Not only does she transcend industries, countries and societally imposed confines on women of color, she also transcends linguistic landscapes. So, when she released ANTI, a sexual exploration of womanhood, relationships, success and general themes of loneliness, it was expected that her album would be met with great critical acclaim. However, the incorporation of her Bajan ancestry proved to be too unfamiliar for her white audiences and they invariably responded to her code switching with ignorance.
Source: http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/30102/1/rihanna-s-patois-and-your-misinformed-memes (reposted from @fuckjerry on Instagram)
This is a meme, attempting to mock her use of Jamaican Patois in the album’s lead single Work. Her use of an entirely different language which was unintelligible to Anglophone members of her audience caused them to think she was speaking nonsense. We see how Rihanna’s ancestry and the context of her music, coupled with certain linguistic elements (phonetic, syntactic and lexical) serve a deliberate musical function as well as an indexing of her identity. Within the context of this song, we can see common sociolinguistic phenomena, both from the perspective of her viewers and the parties they represent as well as the perspective of the artist.
Rihanna has always attempted to incorporate her Bajan ancestry into her music, whether it be the presence of her Jamaican accent or the incorporation of Caribbean English Creole (CEC) syntactic elements, or even styles of reggae that are native to Jamaica. Rihanna “introduces herself as a Caribbean artist” according to Lisa Jansen, with the song Pon de Replay, released in 2007, whose name features two distinct CEC elements, namely the word “Pon” which translates to “on” as well as the TH- stopping in the word “de.” Eleven years later, with Work, she displays her linguistic versatility with frequent codeswitching.
Below are specific examples illustrating the code switching, and their lexical significance, looking specifically at the hook:
Work, work, work, work, work, work
he se me hafi
Translation: He said I have to
CEC Elements: use of personal pronouns “he” and “me” instead of subject pronouns, presence of a modal auxiliary “hafi”
work, work, work, work, work, work
he see me do me
Translation: he saw me doing my
CEC Elements: use of personal pronoun “me” instead of possessive pronoun “my”
dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt
ah so mi better
Translation: so I better
CEC Elements: use of personal pronoun “me” instead of subject pronoun I, use of “ah” to indicate future
work, work, work, work, work, work
when you ah go
Translation: When are you going to
CEC Elements: Tense marker “ah” to indicate future instead of the conjugated “going”
learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn
Meh no care if him
Translation: I don’t care if he’s
CEC Elements: Me and him are personal pronouns used as subject pronouns
Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt
In terms of her accent, there are a number of markers that distinctly index her linguistic capacity in CEC.
Dry! …Me a desert him
Nuh time to have you lurking
Him ah go act like he nuh like it (deletion of h)
You know I dealt with you the nicest (deal, nices, deletion of consonant cluster)
Nuh body touch me you nuh righteous
Nuh badda, text me in a crisis (tex, deletion of consonant cluster)
I believed all of your dreams, adoration (monophthongization of second “a”)
You took my heart and my keys and my patience (monophthongization of first “a”)
You took my heart on my sleeve for decoration (monophthongization of first “a”)
You mistake my love I brought for you for foundation (monophthongization of “a”)
All that I wanted from you was to give me
Something that I never had
Something that you’ve never seen
Something that you’ve never been!
Mmmmm!
But I wake up and act like nothing’s wrong
Just get ready fi…
Presence of Standard American English features:
Syntactic
You took my heart on my sleeve for decoration
I mean who am I to hold your past against you
Phonetic
I believed all of your dreams, adoration (retention of consonant cluster)
Here we can see the assertion of her strong Caribbean linguistic influence as well as her ability to effortlessly code switch between Bajan Creole and Standard American English. She, in fact, uses this linguistic diversity to incorporate certain rhymes (adoration rhymes with patience, nicest with crisis, work now rhymes with dirt and hurt). Her pronunciation of the “t” at the end of “desert” lends itself to form a phonetic rhythm with the fricative “k” in “lurking.”
Additionally, there is a correspondence between her usage of Standard American English v. CEC and the themes she explores. She mostly incorporates SAE into the last two verses, which explicitly reference her romantic relationships and insecurity (for example: “baby don’t you leave, don’t leave me stuck here in the streets”) whereas earlier on when she incorporates more CEC, the meaning of her lyrics is more ambiguous and there is greater room for interpretation on her allusions to her work as well as her necessity of having had to navigate through whiteness in her professional life (for example: “Nuh body touch me you nuh righteous,” “All that I wanted from you was to give me, something that I never had” and “But I wake up and act like nothing’s wrong.”)
Rihanna’s incredible linguistic versatility, however, was either deliberately mocked, as I explained above, or erased. British YouTube singer Samantha Harvey attempts to cover Work but, in the name of artistic individuality, sings a version that she created after having spent “a while translating.” A fellow YouTuber responds with the comment “the lyrics are actually good now.”
Source: This exchange unfortunately reflects a great history of marginalization, wherein languages such as Jamaican Patois and other Caribbean Creoles come out of situations of oppression and Eurocentric dominance. White audience’s perception of Rihanna’s perfectly legitimate use of a perfectly legitimate, developed language as being nonsensical or gibberish parallels long standing assumptions about Creole languages as being illegitimate and their speakers being linguistically incompetent. Frantz Fanon, a Caribbean philosopher and psychologist refers to the perception of Creole as a “halfway house between pidgin-n*gger and French” by descendants of white French colonizers. Here, the failure of a British artist to respect the original Jamaican lyrics just goes to show that white audiences are willing to accept black artistry and black culture but must either criticize it or appropriate it in ways that are palatable to them and conform to their expectations of whiteness and linguistic hegemony.
SOURCES:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/04/talk-that-talk-rihanna-the-cunning-linguist
Languages in Conflict 