Hip-hop in a Post-insular Community

Abstract

The focus of this article is Gazeebow Unit, an adolescent hip-hop group from Newfoundland, Canada, whose tracks, which date from 2005, are available only online. As white rappers whose language is grounded in vernacular Newfoundland English, their rap raises obvious questions relating to both authenticity and hybridization. Despite the group’s use of local linguistic and semiotic resources to style young working-class Newfoundland male “skeet” identity, their authenticity as both working-class Newfoundlanders and rappers was soon to be publicly contested. Though local language and dialect typically represent “resistance vernaculars” in global hip-hop, the use of vernacular Newfoundland English as a performance register on the part of Gazeebow Unit is shown to be considerably more complex. At one level at least, Gazeebow Unit are engaged in parody, or “strategic inauthenticity,” one ramification of which is to reproduce and reinforce dominant ideologies of social class.