Why Errybody Sayin ‘No New Friends’?: The Proverbs of Rap and Why Young People Recite Them

Abstract

Exploring the role hip-hop language arts plays in the development of Black (and other minoritized) youth, this study provides a theoretical account of hip-hop moral codes and how they become part of young people’s ethical sensemaking. This study extends sociocultural theories of moral development by centering the cultural form as a fundamental unit of ethical sensemaking. This study focuses on one particular cultural form, tracing the dissemination of the phrase “no new friends” from its origin in rapper Drake’s 2013 song to its later use by various young people who took it up as a catch phrase in their everyday lives. The study traces the sociogenesis of this cultural form in the cognitive activities of hip-hop adjacent youth as they contemplate their loyalty obligations to their day-one friends. The research employs a discursive analysis of the original song, an analysis of interviews with 21 college students who use the phrase, and a Twitter scrape of 8,716 global mentions of the phrase. These methods are used to explore how hip-hop ethical norms originate in the cultural surround as codes of the street, and are internalized by individual actors, becoming tools they can use within their own ethical deliberation. To properly understand the ontogenesis of ethical sensemaking in a specific adolescent, it is imperative to analyze the cultural forms and social constructs that have evolved in that adolescent’s local communities. Conclusions suggest that one way to operationalize ethical learning is as a process of gaining cultural competency or linguistic fluency with localized moral vernaculars, which includes marginalized literary traditions of third world communities. The study finds that youth take these hip-hop proverbs seriously but not literally, and therefore are able to agentically use proverbs like no new friends to make sense of their social worlds and orient themselves toward “staying down” and “keeping it real.”

Acknowledgments

I will start by expressing trill (true + real) gratitude to the God(s), also known as the highest being(s) of ethical imagination. While humans may study, pray, and reflect for lifetimes, we will only ever understand a small fraction of these divine secrets. Next, I would like to thank the brilliant youth who offered their nuanced perspectives for this study, the incredible student researchers who contributed to data collection & analysis (Cesar Almeida and Yedidia Hubbard), and the legendary colleagues and mentors who read and offered critical feedback on the work including Doug Medin, Eva Lam, Carol Lee, Shirin Vossoughi, and Ben Kirshner. Lastly, I would like to thank the editorial team and reviewers at Cognition & Instruction whose thoughtful reviews significantly upgraded the intellectual content of this manuscript. This is for the hood.