Rihanna Works Her Multivocal Pop Persona: A Morpho-syntactic and Accent Analysis of Rihanna's Singing Style

Abstract

Singing is a very dynamic and innovative mode of communication through which artists often express themselves with a set of various voices. Today, pop music circulates across national boundaries and English is the main medium of communication in transnational pop culture. In this special context different varieties of English meet at a high density. Rihanna's single Work is an example of this prevalent multivocality in pop music culture. Her language performance attracted public attention of various sorts as she audibly incorporates several Caribbean English Creole (CEC) features. While some critics describe her lyrics as ‘gibberish’ (cf. Noelliste, 2016), others acknowledge her performance as a ‘reclamation of her Barbadian heritage’ (Gibsone, 2016). The example of Rihanna shows that singers can be transporters of English varieties: she is a Caribbean artist who started a successful career in the US, and whose music today has global reach. Singers, like Rihanna, are thus mobile, transnational linguistic agents. On the one hand, she physically travels the world playing concerts to her audiences. On the other, her persona, music, videos, and further media commodities are part of the global ‘mediascape’ (Appadurai, 1996). In other words, her products easily spread across the globe and are reproduced, transcending national and social boundaries. New technologies (e.g. smart phones, tablets) and applications (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) facilitate as well as accelerate the transnational dissemination of media resources. Moreover, singers show that the linguistic (and cultural) resources as such are mobile. Different language influences are formed into individual linguistic repertoires. Singers often playfully employ certain features to highlight parts of their identity or locate themselves in a particular music genre.

Global reggae and the appropriation of Jamaican Creole

“…Popular culture products cross national boundaries and can therefore reach audiences from all over the world, which opens up new perspectives in the research on language attitudes and perception by music consumers. The role that the audience plays in the production and reception of music has long been neglected although their perceptions of and attitudes towards language in music performances is of crucial importance to an artist's success (Jansen & Westphal, ). Further research adding to the present study could thus focus on perceptions of the language use of reggae artists.…”

“…In this way, they actively take part in the enhancement of Jamaican Creole's prestige through its use in reggae music all over the world. By also using widespread non‐standardised features and features associated with AAVE and the performance of hip‐hop, the boundaries between the different (sub‐)varieties are blurred, which exemplifies that pop culture is a domain in which identities are affirmed, challenged, and reconstructed (Connell & Gibson, , p. 117; Jansen & Westphal, ). The findings thus have wider implications for the understanding that language and culture, in this case Jamaican Creole and reggae/dancehall music, spread in transnational and transcultural flows (Pennycook, ) and create new centres to and from which semiotic resources spread.…”

“…In his study Akande () finds that, in addition to the Nigerian Pidgin English baseline, Nigerian hip‐hoppers cross into AAVE and Jamaican Creole in order to authenticate their performance and make it more appealing to a global audience (Akande, , p. 251). Jansen and Westphal () who carried out a qualitative analysis of Rihanna's song Work (2016) observe that the singer of Barbadian heritage deploys features of standardised American English, possibly AAVE, and Jamaican Creole, which emphasises the co‐existence of different varieties and styles in her music. Blommaert () illustrates how South African radio DJ Pakaay style‐shifts between standardised English, Jamaican Creole, Dread Talk, AAVE, and Township English in his hip‐hop/reggae show.…”

Discourses of (hetero)sexism in popular music

“…Such studies have also focused almost exclusively on the visual aspects of music videos (Kalof 1999;Wallis 2011), rather than considering how song lyrics might interact with visual elements to produce particular meanings. Linguistic studies of popular music have focused on the stylistic features of song lyrics (Kreyer 2015;Werner 2012), or the use of language varieties in musical performance (Beal 2009;Jansen & Westphal 2017), rather than audience response specifically. Motschenbacher (2013Motschenbacher ( , 2016 analyses naturally-occurring data from Eurovision Song Contest press conferences to examine how European identity/ies are constructed, partly in relation to non-heternormative discourses, with a view to examining ESC press conferences as a Community of Practice (CofP) (see Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992).…”

Learning Music Literacies Across Transnational School Settings

“…Studies of youth musicians with ties to the Caribbean (Alim, 2011; Flores, 2004; Glissant, 1989; Jansen & Westphal, 2017; Wahab, 2016) are united by two primary themes. The first theme is evidence of hybridity in these musicians’ practices, for which Appadurai (2013) provides two related, but distinctive, definitions.…”