Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular Music

‘It's William Back from the Dead’: Commemoration, Representation, and Race in Akala's Hip‐Hop Shakespeare

“…Akala meets the challenge, splicing titles and punning on familiar quotes from twenty‐seven plays – ‘Call it urban, call it street | A rose by any other name, smell just as sweet | Spit so hard, but I'm smart as the Bard’ – in order to suggest a contiguity between his skill and Shakespeare's craft (Akala ). In keeping with hip‐hop's style of ‘the speaker's enhanced and often parodic self‐esteem as a front and centre rhetorical strategy’ (Fischlin :282), Akala raps ‘Akala, Akala, wherefore art thou? I'm the black Shakespeare and | The secret's out now | Chance never did crown me, this is destiny’ (Akala ).…”