(E)Merging of the Old with(in) the New: Continuity of Children’s Play Songs and Rhymes in East African Hip Hop Culture

APA Citation: Kariuki, G. I. (2021). (E)Merging of the Old with(in) the New: Continuity of Children’s Play Songs and Rhymes in East African Hip Hop Culture. Ngano: The Journal of Eastern African Oral Literature, 2, 39-54.

Abstract

    Recording music and disco is not very old in Africa. However, this does not mean that there was an absence of musical performances for public consumption. Hip Hop music, coming from the disco background where the Disc Jockey (DJ) would acknowledge the audience and introduce the singers, was never originally meant to be recorded. The DJs interrupted with rap commentaries to inject immediacy in an otherwise old recording, thus enlivening up the audience. The chorus in Hip Hop songs not only acted as an interlude but was also used by artists to create a specific atmosphere; either for excitement or to charge up the audience’s emotions or summarise the theme of the song. This was an intentional move by the artist to induce memorability of the song to his/her audience. Hip-hop has created newer forms of popular music culture within Africa. Hip Hop artists, as new African cultural practitioners, have innovatively harnessed these new forms of technology in a manner that not only serves to retain the old genres of African literature but also blends them more effectively, bringing out new conventions and new genres that are specific to African popular culture. Amongst the new conventions and lending is that which includes African songs, especially, children play songs and verses infused into Hip Hop. Notably, Hip Hop’s origin is in its reliance on beats and chorus of well-known /popular songs in the community. This incorporation of the popular beats and chorus are those that also borrow from children’s play songs and verses. By doing so, today`s Hip-Hop rappers rely and borrow renowned beats and combine with original rap composition sections which thus gives a continuity and merging of the old and the new, an African past with that of the Western/ American new. This paper thus interrogates the role of children play songs and verses as an old genre in African Orality and the contemporary interaction with Hip Hop music, the creativity, the discourses of formations, re-formation and the transformations that goes beyond entertainment, to include the blending of the unfamiliar with the familiar. It also interrogates the insertion of the old to the new as a way of negotiation, re-negotiations and newer forms of instruction in the all manner of African Cultural Practices and Orality.