Brooke Candy's "Das Me" and "Happy Days". Use of African American English in Hip-Hop and Pop Music (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: Artist Brooke Candy made hip-hop and pop music. This paper investigates and finds out through phonetic analysis that Brooke Candy uses more features of African American Vernacular English in hip-hop than in pop music. The song "Das Me" from 2012 serves to represent Candy's language use during hip-hop music, while the song "Happy Days" from 2016 represents the language use during pop music performances. Candy's use of African American English (AAE) is then compared to her speech when not performing, which is achieved by analysing a short interview of Candy.

However, before the analysis, there is essential information and important concepts that need to be provided. Firstly, there is a closer look at both hip-hop culture and language with a short excursion on AAE as well as popular culture, pop music and its language. Other important concepts, such as "crossing", linguistic appropriation, and performed language, are explained in the following part, while also providing a brief overview of the Eberhardt and Freeman article. Having established the theoretical framework, the two songs and the video are analysed for AAE features. After the analysis, the results are discussed until lastly this paper finishes with some concluding remarks.