Transcription
[00:00:00] I just used the term Black Voice on the internet for the first time today. I’ve been sitting on an idea, like I often do with any of these ideas. I write them down and chill on them. This one in particular since January of this year. But Black Voice…
[00:00:20] A lot of times I’ll make up a term, then later look it up to see if one already exists for it because I don’t like stalling my creative process, I think. But I expect the internet to do what it does and correct me if something already exists. What I’m about to define is not Ebonics. I think Ebonics is low-key racist.
[00:00:50] I think it has European origins, and it makes my flesh crawl to hear Black people say it. But I’m gonna tell you what I think Black Voice is. In speaking, Black Voice is a pattern where a person’s word usage and/or accent sounds like an intended or unintended mimicry of a fleshier mouth common in African people.
[00:01:33] That was really long, and if you have ADHD, you might appreciate me reading that again. So I’ll do that. In speaking, Black Voice is a pattern where a person’s word usage and/or accent sounds like an intended or unintended mimicry of a fleshier mouth found in African people.
[00:01:55] The exaggeration of the mouth structure in order to compensate for a less roomy mouth can make the person’s speech pattern sound inauthentic
[00:02:10] I think it’s best to start these things with examples. One popular person in Black culture is Gary Owen, the comedian. When you hear his stand-up, he’s got the cadence, he’s got the vocabulary or the vernacular, right? He’s talking Black. But you still hear — y- your ears hear that’s not a Black person, that’s not a Black person speaking. The way a person’s mouth determines how their words sound, and if you’ve never heard that before, your brain is aware of it.
[00:03:00] That’s why we can hear when somebody is smiling while they’re talking to us
[00:03:05] Let me give you a second to realize that you can hear a smile in someone’s voice
[00:03:11] But anyway, what our ears become accustomed to in each other’s voices is the shape of their mouths, right? We’re usually connecting it to an image. I– You know, let me just talk about myself ’cause I can’t really talk about how other people’s brains work. But I feel like I sorta see the person’s mouth speaking when I’m, like, talking to them on the phone or when I’m not in the same room with them, and we’re having a conversation, right?
[00:03:43] I sort of visualize what they sound like speaking. But there’s… Black people have more room in their mouth, right? We don’t just have bigger lips. We have fleshier mouths
[00:03:58] Right? And that’s why people who cosmetically try to make their features more African, like make their lips look more African, they look like ducks because they only put injections into the lip part. They don’t do the rest of the mouth to make it match. It’s like, uh, it’s like how the calves don’t match the BBL.
[00:04:25] We’re going too far. So I was talking with a friend recently about comedian Godfrey. I think all cultures by now know who Godfrey is, right? And if you, if by chance you’re in my target audience and you don’t know who Godfrey is, how the heck did you get here? How? How are we related in any way, uh, the same taste and humor?
[00:05:01] I’m not sure how you got here. But anyway, go to Instagram, look up Godfrey. I think it’s like Godfrey Comic or, you know, they usually throw like comic in their name, and just listen to him do Donald Trump. Now, when you realize, when you see Godfrey, you see he has a classic African face, right? Big mouth, right?
[00:05:28] Big… He’s got an African, he’s got a very African face, right? And I think he, his parents are Nigerian. It- but anyway, what I’m saying is, how is it he’s able, how is, is he able to sound so much like Donald Trump, right? Your mind tells you he should not be able to sound like someone whose mouth is, like, classically European.
[00:05:57] Like Eastern European. Like, like no, no lips to speak of, right? It’s just all kinda swept in there, right? It’s kinda got a, a certain butthole quality to it at this point, you know what I mean? How is it that Godfrey, with his large African mouth, is able to emulate that sound, right? Emulate the sound of such a small, drawn-in kind of…
[00:06:30] You know what I mean? Anyway, that’s part of the talent, right? Which feels like magic because your mind isn’t really… Like, your mind is witnessing it, but it’s like, how? How? Really, how? It’s, it’s magic. Another example. One of, one of my favorites, man. One of my favorites that’s just one of those things that’s so contradictory.
[00:06:53] Busta Rhymes, right? Everybody who knows Busta Rhymes knows this dude’s face is mostly mouth, right? It’s gigantic. Even for, like, Black people’s, you know, typical, like, mouth size, you know, relative to their face. It’s on another scale; it’s above average.
[00:07:19] Anyway
[00:07:20] Simply because of physics, and let’s just, you know, throw in some pseudo sci-science. As I understand it, the more mass something has, the more force is needed to move it, right? So somebody with a gigantic mouth should not be able to rap as fast as he does, right?
[00:07:45] And we’re not just talking about, like, saying the ABCs. You know what I mean? He’s f- he’s rhyming, right? He’s rhyming things, you know, at a speed that shouldn’t be possible, man, but that’s part of the magic, right? But anyway, normally all three of those people I used, right, you can hear that they, you know…
[00:08:15] Well, let’s just say not all three. Like Gary Owens sounds like he’s doing what I call Black Voice simply because that’s just… You know what I mean? That’s just his, his anatomy. It’s an anatomy thing, right? There’s no… He’s never gonna sound to the Black ear like somebody who’s spent significant years being around Black people talking, i.e.
[00:08:48] Someone raised Black, he’s never gonna sound to one of us like a Black person. We’re always gonna hear that quality that’s not there. We’re not gonna hear that higher-volume mouth. Is volume, right? That more dense mouth shape. We’re not gonna hear it, right? So that is always gonna sound like, “Is that person being disrespectful?”
[00:09:18] You know what I mean? But I just, I guess I’m saying this to, of course, give Black Voice a definition, but I’m also gonna throw in a little philosophy there, right? If we’re not sure if someone is doing Black Voice, and you know I’m putting up air quotes, if we’re not sure that they’re doing it to be disrespectful Meaning we don’t know them personally- we probably shouldn’t assume that they’re trying to be disrespectful, ’cause that might not be the case.
[00:09:52] I think anyone that was raised around hearing a certain way of speaking, you know, more often during their developmental years will probably… And that could have been from, like, watching hours of BET, you know what I mean? Whatever. If the majority of their speech, those speech patterns that they heard, were from Black Voices, it makes sense that they would sound like us, which is, I guess, in italics, sound like us 😅.
[00:10:28] But that’s Black Voice. That’s enough
[00:10:32] I wanna take another crack at that conclusion. I mentioned the comedian Gary Owen as an example of someone who talks like a Black person talks, but whose words don’t sound Black. I mentioned Godfrey the comedian and Busta Rhymes as examples of people whose size of their mouths you can hear in their voice.
[00:11:10] To give you popular examples of people that you know, when you hear, sound Black. It’s not just the sound that, that shapes how a person talks, it’s the shape of their mouth. It might sound like someone whose mouth is not shaped like a Black person’s mouth; it might sound like they’re doing Black Voice when they speak in the way that Black people (from Black American culture) speak.