Elijah Wald – Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap |
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A history of the street insult game that has inspired artists from Jelly Roll Morton to Zora Neale Hurston to NWA, previously published in hardcover as The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama. Oxford University Press, 2014. "This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published." "The dozens is the most ephemeral and most contextual of the black verbal traditions, hence the hardest to get a handle on. But after reading Elijah Wald's superbly researched and splendidly written book, no one will have any doubt what this important black verbal tradition is and means." "My father told us to never let a white man tell you how to be black, never let a woman tell you how to be a man, and to always make it sexy. This book is sexy... and poignant, smart and a piece of history." "The influential African-American vernacular verbal art called 'the dozens' are in very good hands here. Wald gives them the detailed, broad, and serious consideration they have long deserved." "This has got to be the dirtiest scholarly book ever!" "The more Wald insists on taking both turns at the crossroads--simultaneously asserting that the dozens is a rural Southern black ritual and stressing its heterodox urbanity and pan-linguistic sampling--the more recklessly fun his book becomes....virtuosic..." "The Dozens is a profanely sacred history lesson that vacillates between monster one-liners and carefully articulated deep thoughts.... Wald...is your only plausible tour guide, capable of illuminating both the blunt simplicity and fraught complexity, the cheerful frivolity and deadly severity of it all." "Wald... scrapes the white man's version of black history against black reality to spark one hell of a discussion of this elusive and ephemeral ancestor of some of today's most popular music." |
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“The dozens” is a tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap. At its simplest, it is a comic concatenation of “yo' mama” jokes. At its most complex, it is a form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Whether considered as vernacular poetry, verbal dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens has been a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians for a century. This book explores the depth of the dozens’ roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; the edgy brilliance of generations of black comedians; and the raw language and improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden tradition that has survived for well over a hundred years below the surface of American popular culture, the dozens links children's clapping rhymes to low-down juke joints and the most modern street verse to the earliest African American folklore. In tracing the form and its variations over more than a century of African American culture and music, The Dozens sheds new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, the literature of the Harlem renaissance and the flowering of blue nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap. |
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Chapters and examples: 1. A Trip down Twelfth Street
2. The Name of the Game
3. Singing the Dozens 4. Country Dozens and Dirty Blues
5. The Literary Dozens
6. Studying the Street
7. The Martial Art of Rhyming
8. Around the World with Your Mother |
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9. African Roots While in most of the world mother-insulting seems to be largely an adolescent or hostile behavior, in much of Africa there are traditions of using dozens-style insults for ceremonial purposes, as well as to accompany combat, or just to get a laugh. African diaspora cultures of the Americas have further developed these traditions, and though none quite matches the U.S. dozens, there is a deep family resemblance throughout the Black Atlantic. (Check out this video of Emiliano Zuleta and Lorenzo Morales, two giants of Afro-Colombian vallenato, revisiting their classic insult duel, "La Gota Fria".) |
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10. Slipping Across the Color Line Like jazz, blues, and hip-hop, the dozens was born in African American culture but soon expanded beyond its original neighborhoods. Black teens played the dozens on their white counterparts, and white kids formed their own variations. (Somehow, when I wrote this chapter, I left out by far the most popular dozens line in white U.S. culture: "Your mother wears army boots!" I don't know what I was thinking...)
11. Why Do They (We) Do That? |
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12. Rapping, Snapping, and Battling |
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Review by Preston Lauterbach in the Wall Street Journal. Radio interview on WNYC's Soundcheck. Press site for The Dozens. |