ABSTRACT
In the example below, from the track ‘Bring Your Style’ by Japanese rap group Rip Slyme, one line of African American-infl uenced rap – with its indexical ‘yo’ – is juxtaposed with a line of Japanese, albeit Japanese which contains a constructed word – freaky side – in katakana (the script generally for non-Japanese items). How can we go about understanding this use of English, this incorporation of African American-infl uenced lyrics in a Japanese track? Is this yet another example of the steady creep of English into other cultures, invading, homogenizing, destroying? Is the use of English a refl ex of the global music industry where an English word or phrase may signal the international over the local, dollars over yen? Does the English refl ect a will to global communication and the Japanese a will to local identity? Is the English here possibly also part of Japanese culture? What does it mean to imitate American language and music in this way? Does such copying mean only slavish duplication or is there something else to be understood in the process of such mimicry, such ‘styling the Other’, as Rampton (1999) puts it? These are some of the questions that inform this chapter, which will look particularly at issues of English and authenticity.
