Do We Applaud Poor Grammar?
Music is a national past time. It can bring about all kinds of emotions and thoughts. Really music can educate and almost teach you how to speak… but not necessarily speak correctly. There are plenty of songs to use as examples, but a new hit song called The Way I Are says it all, literally, read the title again! Not only does singer or rapper (whatever he refers to himself) Timbaland sing the title of the song throughout, he also includes the phrase “ain’t got no” and “we be the”. How about the double negative “can’t go nowhere”. There’s also “It don’t matter” and “I don’t got”.
I’m not trying to make fun of Timbaland’s incorrect grammar, but I am trying to make a point. What are we teaching our youth? Why are we celebrating and almost popularizing being uneducated? Just because you’re famous doesn’t mean speaking poorly is suddenly correct! I wonder if we’re dumbing down future generations! Is this the ‘talk’ of our current and future youth?! Am I that out of the loop? Perhaps this is a way of rebelling against the ‘system’, the rules. Well there has to be a better way to make a statement… if you can say the statement grammatically correct that is! 
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Comments
What a timely topic. I heard Dr. Maya Angelou speak this past Friday evening and she brought up this very topic. She said that she is frequently asked her opinion on many aspects of American and African-American culture, and especially about music. Her response to the argument that artist must “keep it real” was “They are wrong to use that language because those are the words that we used against me. And, by continuing to speak in such a way, they prove the original users to be correct.”
Sure, the music is reflective of the culture….its the culture that must change.
Rock the Casbah has a good point, it might be cultural. But I’m not sure if I would say the whole culture is represented by that dialect. And does all of the culture want rappers and singers to speak for them? It seems hard to believe that kind of grammar embodies an ENTIRE culture.
Speaking as one who spent 6 years in college earning an education degree and a former history/English teacher, it’s alright to abuse the language once you’ve proven you know how to use it correctly. As a born and bred Okie, sometimes it’s ok to speak like Festus from “Gunsmoke”. Imagine someone trying to sell a life insurance policy talking and sounding like they just fell off a south-bound Santa Fe train. “I hear you ain’t got no protection. I got just the thing you’ll be a needin’.”
Culture, like so many other things in life, has its time and place.
You miss the whole cultural statement aspect of the performance. Rap is African American; African Americans are from the South; the South has its own particular way of speaking English, and some forms of it are identified as speech patterns of African Americans. I say that you miss the cultural aspect because a performer must remain true to culture that generated that particular phenomena. An Italian opera, for instance, is sung in Italian. Even if Timbaland, or to please you, Timberland, couldn’t “rap” any other way and retain artistic credibility with his audience. You can’t tap dance with your teeth.
As far as children imitating the speech patterns found in this music, continuing to correct them till kingdom come will reassure them that it’s unacceptable. Hardly anyone has to walk too far from to confirm this.