The aim of the paper is to discover the degree of involvement of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in hip hop lyrics. AAVE or in its more commonly known name, Black English is often mixed up with or identified as a slang type of the standard English. However, this is not true: it is a variety of English just as e.g. Canadian English. In this paper, I want to examine whether there is a correspondence between AAVE and hip hop slang and if there is, what is the level of influence of the first on the latter. Hip hop was originated from African American urban youth culture and one of its subgenre, rap, as it can be read on wordnetweb.princeton.edu, is basically about chanting rhyming lyrics to a musical accompaniment.