Rap as literacy: A genre analysis of Hip-Hop ciphers

Abstract

Socioliteracy, meaning concern with practices, genre, and ideologies, has arguably displaced decoding orthographic writing in the mainstream of literacy theory and research. However, this shift has engendered disagreements about the meaning of literacy itself. Whereas some theorists take the Multiliteracies view that all forms of communication can be considered literacy, others require involvement of written language or, alternatively, education-dependent genres.

The present study supports the Multiliteracies definition by exploring an oral vernacular genre, the rap cipher—improvised round-robin rhyming— which fails both proposed delimiting criteria, as literacy. The study explores a young inner-city rap crew’s ciphers using the kind of ethnography and genre analysis typical of socioliteracy research. It finds that the practices and forms of the ciphers are tightly bound up with their creators’ ideologies and that when holders of incompatible ideologies interact in rap, generic confliict results. Since such findings directly parallel those of numerous literacy studies of written and educational forms, they suggest that similar processes occur across modalities and domains. This conclusion suggests that it may be useful to conceptualize literacy as a particular perspective on communicative forms rather than as an inherent quality of certain forms.