The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

Conclusion

Conclusion There is never only one game (race or gender). (Ortner 1997, 12–13) In the spring of 2003, I was invited to present a chapter of this work at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. One of the most distinguished and renowned African American historians and political scientists Manning Marable was present , as were a host of graduate students and scholars—many of them women—ranging in age from about twenty-five to sixty. Marable recognized the popular songs from rhythm and blues in the 1950s and ’60s that had been embedded within contemporary girls’ game-songs performed during the last twenty years, while the young women in the room remembered references in game-songs of their youth as the popular songs of a more recent past, whether they had grown up in Chicago or Philadelphia. My presentation rekindled the memory of several games once forgotten by a beautiful sister with locks who grew up in suburban Chicago. A jazz vocalist and a Ph.D. student wrapping up the final chapter of her dissertation on the spiritual voicings of Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and Cassandra Wilson. LaShonda waited after the talk to perform for me. The cheer began with a triplet rhythm into the downbeat sung to a refrain that was remarkably familiar to my hip-hop ears: Rock, Rock to the Planet Rock / BAM! / Don’t stop! / Rock, Rock to the Planet Rock / BAM! / Don’t stop! I immediately hit the “record” button on my hand-held computer and captured the popular music from her school days. I played it back to LaShonda on the spot to marvel at discovering another connection between girls’ games and hip-hop. 181 “Do you know what that is?” I asked. “No,” she replied matter-of-factly. Now in her early thirties, LaShonda was into jazz not hip-hop. “Do you know ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa ?” “No.” She was not up on the beats of hip-hop and this is one of the classics from early recorded rap. In 1982, “Planet Rock” humanized electronic technology in hip-hop for the body rockers on the dance floor. A former member of the infamous Black Spades gang in the South Bronx, Bambaataa (born Kevin Donovan, 1960–) founded the antiracist and nonviolent Zulu Nation, the first hiphop organization. Its purpose was to transform the deadly battles of young gang members into friendly battles competing to become the grandmaster of DJ-ing or the king or queen of breakdancing or Brooklyn uprocking. “Planet Rock” kicked off the electronic funk/electro-rap movement featuring the innovation of employing a TR-808 drum machine. “Planet Rock” was a wholly synthesized, twelve-inch single released in 1981 on Tommy Boy Records based on the techno-pop futurism of “Trans-Europe Express,” an underground discotheque hit by the German “robot pop” group Kraftwerk. LaShonda’s chant evolved from the hook of “Planet Rock” accompanied by a triplet pattern of foot-stomps mimicking the pulsating, planetary funk, kick-drum effects produced from the TR-808 drum machine. This particular kick-drum bass timbre became synonymous with hip-hop production throughout the 1980s. The end of LaShonda’s introduction was mirrored in the four hard kicks that serve as a mini-break or a percussive fill throughout “Planet Rock.” LaShonda was clueless about the significance of the song outside her realm of memory of performing it with her sister. She may not remember it, but “Planet Rock” was surely the hot track circulating around the subculture of her adolescence as a teenager in the late seventies and early eighties. The oral-kinetic transmission of black girls’ play was her direct feed. A few weeks later, I invited LaShonda to visit my hip-hop course to teach her version of “Planet Rock” and several other cheers she grew up performing. They were all based on funk hits from the early 1980s, including Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging” and the S.O.S. Band’s “Take Your Time.” Upon hearing Afrika Bambaataa’s original for the first time, she had no recollection of ever hearing it before. 182 | Conclusion This is kinetic orality at work. The link between black girls and adult popular music suggests that black girls’ games represent a somatic historiography of black musical experience, and that tracing the interchange between girls’ games and popular songs clearly points to a gendered...