Tradition in transition: the habits of language in Ghanaian hiplife lyrics

Abstract

The future of every nation is embedded in its youth. The older generation eats sour grape and sets the teeth of the youth on edge. A vibrant youth seeks a better future for itself since if one fails to comment on how one’s head is shaven, one ends up having a bad shave (The Author). This qualitative (textual) research is premised on the fact that research into Hiplife genre in recent years has not devoted attention to the source of its rhetorical vehemence, leading Adegbite (2006) to admonish scholars to broaden their scope of research to embrace all varieties of musical styles. The research explores the stylistic use of language in Hiplife lyrics and its effect in achieving rhetorical vehemence. The study sets out to examine the linguistic codes, perspectives of presentation, dominant tropes and schemes inherent in Hiplife lyrics that imbue it with the artistic vehemence. This stylistic study of the song texts is guided by Bloomfield’s (1976) categorization which defines areas of study in stylistics. The present study adopts four of the Bloomfield’s stylistic taxonomy - the descriptive, rhetorical, language and cultural/group dynamics of stylistics - and in the light of these, examines the stylistic elements in Hiplife lyrics. This framework combined with the Formalist analytical methodology provides detailed description and functional analysis of the stylistic facilities to evince the unique linguistic and literary characteristics of the genre. The study purposively sampled sixty Hiplife song texts composed by thirty-six Ghanaian Hiplife artistes between 1990 and 2018 as the primary data for analysis. The study also employs interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation to collect secondary data. The study among other things shed deeper light on defining Hiplife as a cultural tool that is used in the discourse of nation building. Again, it presents Hiplife lyrics as a literary material that facilitates the conceptualisation of stylistics in Ghanaian context. Finally, the study provides a corpus on the genre to facilitate other researches into Hiplife.