HipHop:A teens perspective
...lar elements of two cultures). In the area of religion, many first-generation enslaved persons refused conversion to Christianity, and continued to practice their native faiths. Those who did sincerely convert to Christianity, however, filtered it through their spiritual experiences in Africa. For example, those who belonged to water-cults in Africa were attracted to the Baptist religion, with its water-based spiritual practices. Symbols such as altars and crosses (the same symbol occurs in many African religions but is interpreted as a crossroads or decision point) provided a transition point from native religions to the Africans' autonomous practice of Christianity. The same process was at work with many linguistic elements, as the enslaved persons sought to find a shared language where none existed. To this end, many forms of codes, including double entendre and syllabic distortion, were used to disguise the enslaved persons' meanings from any eavesdroppers. For example, "chicken" was used to mean the master's son or daughter, and a slave could tell his or her owner that he or she wasn't hungry because they had had chicken last night. The white person would think nothing of this, but all of the initiated assembled would understand the sexual braggadocio of that statement. Another common technique was the infixing of syllables into words, for example putting "iz" in the middle of certain words-which still occurs in hip-hop vernacular, as in "H to the Izzo". To one who doesn't know to listen for the infix, the result is extremely difficult to understand. Fast-forward to the early-to-mid twentieth century, when previously ubiquitous chemical substances such as cocaine, opiates, and cannabis (which Abraham Lincoln wrote in his diaries of smoking) began to be criminalized as a means of persecuting minorities. Many African-Americans who were imprisoned brought their unique dialect and expressive slang with them, where they continued to employ it to obfuscate their speech in the presence of the warden and guards. As prisons became more integrated (at least in numbers if not in practice), the African-American prisoners' dialect began to intermingle with the prison slang that white prisoners used. One example is the verb "bogart", meaning to take over, appropriate, or steal. This appears to have been of origin among Caucasian prisoners, as a reference to tough-guy film star Humphrey Bogart. It survives today both in prison lexicon and hip-hop vocabulary, and is an example of the interracial linguistic commerce, which is so rich in prison. Another example is "rap". A rap originally was anything said. "To rap,” meant, "to speak". (It also referred to a prison sentence or a beating.) It may have begun as a reference to African-American prisoners communicating by rapping their knuckles on the walls, in the same rhythmic statements that the talking drums had used throughout slavery. Raps didn't have to rhyme; in fact, they rarely did. They were, however, usually memorized. They were used on the outside by drug dealers, the homeless, confident men, etc. (Additionally, An example would be "Hey, how ya doin'? Listen, I've got this problem; my brother was supposed to meet me here..." used over and over again by a homeless person as a means of collecting sympathy and contributions from passerby. That person would be said to be a "rapper", as he made his living by "rapping". The modern term of "rap", referring to a series of rhymed bra...