British rappers with US accents?

benjybars

village elder.
i've heard bare stuff (wiley & skepta interviews for example) saying that a good thing about grime is that the MCs use their own accents instead of putting on american ones...

Basically this all implies that throughout the 90s all british rappers/mcs were going around pretending to be in NWA or something, but the thing is I can't think of ANY examples of british rappers explicitely sounding american..

Is this all a myth?? if not, who were the worst offenders??
 

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
Perhaps kids on the street were using US accents for MCing before grime made it accetpable for them to use uk ones?

So not the UK Hip Hop scene, but the starndard UK kids into US hip hop.
 

muser

Well-known member
yea ive heard uk hiphop emcees go on about it aswell and havnt really ever noticed it myself, infact I cant even really think of any mainstream examples of this happening.
 

mms

sometimes
early on there were some derek b and the she rockers spring to mind but not really that many.
 

gabriel

The Heatwave
weirdly, just this week i was listening to a tune by Life (from Phi-Life Cypher) from about 1999/2000 and suddenly i noticed he was rapping in an american accent. though i listened to the tune LOADS about 5/6 years ago, at the time it never occurred to me that his accent was US-inflected. it's especially odd cos the tune (In Memory) is about the Stephen Lawrence case, so it's very UK-specific, and also he occasionally drops into a kind of UK-JA-patois (bloodclaat this, ism & schism that etc). but his vowel sounds on words like 'mockery' are very american - it becomes mawkery/markery, that long drawl that we don't really do here.

so there's one example. can't think of any others, but the fact that i hadn't realised until so recently that this tune was in a yankee accent indicates maybe there's others like that...
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Pretty much everyone in the UK from 85 - 92 did except London Posse and Demon Boyz, and even Demon Boyz had a US inflection, but Demon D's voice was so weird that you just took it.
Worst offender? JC001 I reckon. And anyone who got into the charts, you couldn't have a rap by a UK person on your pop record if it sounded UK, the rapper had to sound US.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Lots of British rock bands have adopted American accents, I mean huge acts like Led Zeppelin and Cream. So it doesn't come as any suprise that this would happen in other genres as well.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Lots of British rock bands have adopted American accents, I mean huge acts like Led Zeppelin and Cream. So it doesn't come as any suprise that this would happen in other genres as well.

Yeah, there's that transatlantic thing going on, but it is weird to do, especially now with the fall of the US and stuff. It'd be great to hear people putting on fake, erm, Chinese accents or something.
 

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, there's that transatlantic thing going on, but it is weird to do, especially now with the fall of the US and stuff. It'd be great to hear people putting on fake, erm, Chinese accents or something.

American culture still has a huge impact over here. I don't think the average teenage My Chemical Romance fan really cares about the value of the dollar or the US manufacturing sector shrinking. Although in 50-100 years, who knows?
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
All I know is I'm gonna start singing with a fake Cantonese accent. History will prove me right, just like Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
 

MankyFiver

Well-known member
SugarBear was US, to my knowledge, and Robert Wyatt is so UK it's painful. I guess you could call Robert Wyatt a rapper. He'd probably chuckle.

its probably cos i remember the wee papa girls loving him and me assuming cos their south of the river he was
and mr wyatt well...

you ever hear pigs?
 

benjybars

village elder.
it's true about indie/rock bands using generic transatalntic accents when singing, and we actually looked at some interesting studies on that during my linguistics degree...

back on the rappers/mc tip, does anyone else ever detect a slight hint of american in Kano??!
i remember when i first got into grime i used to think that, although i don't really notice it anymore so maybe i just imagined it.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
its probably cos i remember the wee papa girls loving him and me assuming cos their south of the river he was
and mr wyatt well...

you ever hear pigs?

SugaBear or Wyatt? We used to cane the Sugabear track, it was huge all over London, i thought they were west though. Monie was south but she really was US so she was allowed.
 

MankyFiver

Well-known member
aw! it be nice if the wee papa girls were wyatt groupies but it was sugar bear, same i used to hear it all over south london
used to quite like monie love but then i heard that roxanne track when she tore her apart

does monie work for southwark now? im sure she refused me my redecorating money
 
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