Dip Hop

July 27, 2023 9:42 AM

Deaf rappers who lay down rhymes in sign languages are changing what it means for music to be heard.
posted by DirtyOldTown (10 comments total)

deaf jam
posted by dismas at 9:49 AM on July 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is really cool!
posted by praemunire at 9:57 AM on July 27, 2023

🤟🏻
posted by chavenet at 10:45 AM on July 27, 2023

I recently caught Wawa’s performance in The Tuba Thieves at Sundance. It was a straight acting job—no rapping—but he was magnetic, as was Nyeisha Prince, the actress who played his daughter. It’s very much an art movie, and their roles are both very low key, but I was captivated.
posted by Playdoughnails at 11:54 AM on July 27, 2023

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter…
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 11:58 AM on July 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Decades ago I worked at a club with a powerful sound system. We had a number of regulars who were deaf. They could feel the beat and dance right along with everyone else. They really seemed to enjoy themselves...
posted by jim in austin at 4:24 PM on July 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing this - really cool!
posted by Toddles at 6:13 PM on July 27, 2023

@jim in austin,
I used to work as a relay operater for TTY phones and my manager there had this absolutely disgustingly loud bass system and played some truly awful hip hop for the beats.
posted by robotmachine at 8:10 PM on July 27, 2023

Interesting. At least right now, those examples of dip hop seem like they have the rhythmic simplicity of old skool, early 80s rap - where the words hit the beats hard and simple. I feel like someone's going to bring more complex flow to this and it's going to just blow the top off it.

It's things like this that make me wish I was actually fluent in ASL, which is among my favorite languages ever conceptually. There is so much stuff that can be done in poetry with it, and I'm not seeing as much complex in these examples as I would like. At some point, someone's going to start signing really using complex combinations of minimal pairs - signs which differ in only one of handshape, movement, location, orientation, or non-manual markers - and it's going to just blow people's minds. I can come up with stupid phrases, like "Hungry for coffee but horny for work", but someday someone's going to come up with something good.
posted by Xiphias Gladius at 5:17 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Xiphias Gladius, I had never before considered the possibility of minimal pairs in ASL, and now I'm fascinated. Thank you for bringing that up!

And thank you for the post, DirtyOldTown. Some of the students I work with use ASL, and I can't wait to share this with them and with my colleagues.
posted by DingoMutt at 1:59 PM on July 28, 2023