Talking 'Bout Your Mama

Zusatztext A pleasure to read from front to back, and Wald's vast knowledge of blues repertory allows him to make connections between songs themselves and between blues and other genres that employ the dozens. The many quotations from dozens exchanges make for colorful reading (Wald himself censors nothing), Wald's prose is consistently entertaining, the pace is brisk without sacrificing detail, and the breadth of sources ensures that every reader will come away with new information. Informationen zum Autor Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy. Klappentext In Talking About Your Mama, Elijah Wald has turned his attention to the deep roots of rap in American culture with a wide-ranging look a street tradition called "the dozens," where African American music began. Wald traces the form and its variations throughout more than a century of African American culture and music, from minstrelsy and the blues through to jazz and hip-hop. Zusammenfassung In Talking About Your Mama, Elijah Wald has turned his attention to the deep roots of rap in American culture with a wide-ranging look a street tradition called "the dozens," where African American music began. Wald traces the form and its variations throughout more than a century of African American culture and music, from minstrelsy and the blues through to jazz and hip-hop.

Autorentext

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.

Klappentext

In Talking About Your Mama, Elijah Wald has turned his attention to the deep roots of rap in American culture with a wide-ranging look a street tradition called "the dozens," where African American music began. Wald traces the form and its variations throughout more than a century of African American culture and music, from minstrelsy and the blues through to jazz and hip-hop.

Zusammenfassung
From Two Live Crew's controversial comedy to Ice Cube's gangsta styling and the battle rhymes of a streetcorner cypher, rap has always drawn on deep traditions of African American poetic word-play, In Talking About Your Mama, author Elijah Wald explores one of the most potent sources of rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game known as "the dozens." So what is the dozens? At its simplest, it's a comic chain of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it's an intricate form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Wald traces the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that has ruled urban neighborhoods since the early 1900s. Whether considered vernacular poetry, aggressive dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens is 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 from Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Johnson to Tupac Shakur and Jay Z. Wald goes back to 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 comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and in its ultimate evolution into the improvisatory battling of rap. From schoolyard games and rural work songs to urban novels and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap, Wald uses the dozens as a lens to provide new insight into over a century of African American culture. A groundbreaking work, Talking About Your Mama is an essential book for anyone interested in African American cultural studies, history and linguistics, and the origins of rap music.

Inhalt

• 1. A Trip Down Twelfth Street
• 2. The Name of the Game
• 3. Singing the Dozens
• 4. The Blue Dozens
• 5. The Literary Dozens
• 6. If You Grin, You're In
• 7. The Martial Art of Rhyming
• 8. Around the World with Your Mother
• 9. African Roots and Branches
• 10. The Dozens and Race
• 11. Why Do We (They) Do that?
• 12. Rapping, Snapping, and Dueling on YouTube