The evolution of the rhythmic speech really of hip hop, of rapping again we have to understand that when Africans went to America and to the Caribbean and to Brazil South America, it was like in Jamaica for example, I will give you the Jamaican example. You have 20 different African linguistic groups in Jamaica. All of whom have different words but different rhythmic tonality. So, what you think of as the Jamaican Patwa accent is not just Jamaicans failing to speak English properly, its Africanised English. It has the bit of flex the rhythmic tonalities and syntax and even the structure of tenses in Jamaican Patwa are the structures of tenses in the West African linguistic groups. We still don\u2019t even have some of the words like the word pygmy, it\u2019s not an English word, we say pygmy means chop, well it\u2019s like that in Sierra Leone and there\u2019s various other words and tonalities in Jamaica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I suppose the Jamaican accent really lends itself so easiy to to rap because West African speech if you know it, European speech is structured in Arabic, twos, one, two didum didum didum didum. West African speech is on threes, I can\u2019t do it as well as my friend did it in the documentary, he just did recently but it\u2019s very rhythmical speech and that continues from jazz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in early jazz music you know, we have Skank you can go on YouTube and watch Ella Fitzgerald you know doing these sounds and no one explains why. But when you understand that Ella is a person whose original language is lost, who is trying to find a new language which will end up doing all these sounds and then you listen to a West African talking really fast it becomes obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n