Language and style in globalized musical genres: the case of blues and hip hop

This article examines how linguistic practices participate in the formation and global spread of musical genres by comparing two African American traditions with markedly different linguistic trajectories: the blues and hip hop. Drawing on theories of style, stylization, and genre, we argue that linguistic meaning in musical performance emerges at the intersection of individual artistic choice, genre-level expectations, and processes of transnational circulation. Corpus-based analyses of 540 blues recordings demonstrate that the globalization of the blues has been accompanied by the stabilization of a monolingual, anglophone idiom oriented toward highly salient features of African American English (AAE), which may function as markers of ‘authentic’ blues performance. Conversely, globalized rap within hip hop culture has evolved into a multilingual, hybridized practice in which performers mobilize local languages, marginalized linguistic varieties, and limited traces of AAE to construct locally meaningful forms of authenticity while aligning with global genre norms such as flow and competitive verbal dexterity. Through this comparison, we show that genres differ in the extent to which they stabilize around a linguistic variety or invite ongoing linguistic hybridity, and we propose that stylization functions as a key process through which performers negotiate the tension between genre-level expectations and individual artistic expression. Our findings hence highlight how linguistic patterns do not merely accompany musical genres, but actively contribute to their formation, circulation, and social meaning in the globalized world.