Signifyin' - Music

Music

Caponi (1999) "describes calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony" as examples of signifying in hip hop music and other African-American music. She explains that signifying differs from simple repetition and from simple variation in that it uses material

rhetorically or figuratively — through troping, in other words — by trifling with, teasing, or censuring it in some way. Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastische, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech, or narration, and other troping mechanisms… Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values.

Schloss relates this to the ambiguity common to African musics including looping (as of a sample) for "it allows individuals to demonstrate intellectual power while simultaneously obscuring the nature and extent of their agency… It allows producers to use other people's music to convey their own compositional ideas".