Joseph Kanyi Thiong'o PhD Thesis 2025 - Stylistic Choices and Oral Nuances in Selected Bongo Flava Songs Case of Diamond Platnumz and Marlaw
Description
Stylistic use of language remains a rich area that feeds literary research and studies with both explicit and implicit meaning encompassed in text. As a result, this research is set to investigate how Bongo Flava artists use language artistically to conflate meaning. The objectives of the research were to interrogate the influences on the style and meaning of Bongo Flava music, drawn from the earlier literary traditions such as Tenzi and hip-hop, and to examine the lexical choices and their construction in determining meaning in Bongo Flava songs. And to examine how the manner of voice appropriation through supra-segmental choices such as tone, intonation, and others contributes to the meaning decipherable in Bongo Flava performances. The research employed relevance theory, ethnopoetics, and stylistic criticism. The methodology of the research involved purposive sampling of two Bongo Flava artists, namely Diamond Platnumz and Marlaw. An in-depth analysis and transcription of over 145 songs, and in addition, interviewing Bongo Flava fans and music producers. The findings of this research reveal that meaning in Bongo Flava can be permeated at lexical and phonological levels. Cultural influences at lexical and phonological levels, as the study observed, determine plausible meaning in Bongo Flava songs. The artists use different stylistic techniques to address themes, for example, love, politics, gender, social identities, and power relations. Bongo flava music, as the researcher observed, borrows a lot from Swahili poetry and uses rich and expressive language, which is deeply rooted in Swahili culture and history. Swahili poetry has a strong tradition of storytelling, which is carried forward in Bongo flava music. These include the use of local languages to rap and traditional and musical instruments. Respondents brought in a lot of shared knowledge in how they inferred meaning from the voice of the musician. Culture, in this regard, influences two aspects of the voice. The information and interpretation that members of Swahili culture can infer from a piece of communication—based on the manner of utterance—are heavily influenced by shared knowledge. Consequently, this leads to the infusion of what the researcher termed as cultural ostensions, which form the oral nuances that define the shared beliefs and the meaning and relevance attached to them. In this context, the researcher observed, for instance, that the manner of singing a dirge, for instance, must bring out nuances of pain, loss, and tears that the mourner experiences as one reflects on the dead. An area that requires further research, as this research observed, is interrogation of how sonic features in songs influence the meaning listeners infer while listening to songs.
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Data classification, identification of categories, and identification of themes. (Analysis of meaning suggested by the syntactic and lexical choices on the one hand and the meaning implied in the voice of the artist on the other hand as sonic texts. The study applied the following tenets of the theory: Transcription of the lyrics, Classification of ensuing meaning based on the manner of utterance at the syntactic level, accounting for the meaning that results from the manner of utterance, discussion on the filtering process (that is, the process through which a listener internalizes the meaning), encyclopedic entries (that is, social-cultural factors that influence the inferences a listener makes based on present nuances in a voice), cognitive environment (that is, assumptions informing the meaning one infers from contexts of implicit communication), and cognitive effect (that is, the ultimate meaning one deduces from the message and voice of the artist). The analytical procedure involved identifying the stylistic use of lyrics and the voice of the artist. The explicit meaning in the song text was then interrogated at two levels. Firstly, explicit messages are based on the grammatical meaning of the words and sentences. Then the implicit meaning is based on other meanings, which the artist passes to the audience indirectly as a result of using language artistically. The interrogation of the implied meaning was based on underscoring the meaning as plausible based on the cultural context of language usage. The filtering process focuses on the possible meaning manner of language usage creates in the listeners' minds, which is referred to as the cognitive effect. While such meaning relies on the lexical choices on the one hand, on the other hand, it relies on the effect the song has on the listeners when played and listened to through the ear. These meanings that a song invokes are what this study defines as sonic effects. A listener, in this case, can infer a given meaning depending on the sonic effect(s) the voice of the artist creates as a result of the mood of the persona. Moods in this context were categorised according to the effect the sound has on the audience. This was based on the assumption that the knowledge defining the cultural meanings the artist and audience associate with oral nuances helps one to infer the meaning encompassed in the song based on cultural contexts determining the manner of expression and articulation.
Institutions
- University of Nairobi