“I Said What I Said”: Final Notes on Ratchet/Boojie Politics

Abstract

Hip-hop has a tremendous amount of influence within Black communities of practice. While not every Black person listens to hip-hop music regularly, or engages with its culture through fashion (“Skinny jeans or nah?”), politics (“Who really killed Tupac?”), or debates (“Who’s your Top 5?”), the language of hip-hop—what H. Samy Alim refers to as Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL) (Alim 2006)—often finds ways of exerting a great amount of influence over the daily lexical choices of many people living in and among African American speech communities. Further, there has been an increased mainstreaming and popularization of hip-hop personalities who bring HHNL to primetime with them. As hip-hop artists borrow from local Black discursive practices and terminology, taking them out of their original contexts, they make those words available within other local contexts. These terms then get laminated onto already rich and dense discursive fields where Black culture, practice, and ideologies bend and flex to accommodate the ideas contained in those terms: shout out to my woes. It is no wonder then why ratchet has found its way into public and private discourses of Black Americans without much attention paid to the ways that it operates in and on the lives of those to whom it refers, those who fall outside of the notions of propriety, acceptability, and respectability.