Living in London, I suppose my view of hip hop is skewed differently. The way hip hop was born in the Bronx is a mix of a very long tradition of Latino and African American poetry by the last poets and people like that. But then honestly we have all heard African apart from anyone else coming from Caribbean it’s like this blend of two different African cultures.
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.
