-
Introduction
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction When we think of the music that drives the popular culture of African Americans, our first thought is not of double-dutch: girls bouncing between two twirling ropes, keeping time to the tick-tat under their toes, stepping out with snatches of song and dance that animate their torsos and release their tongues with laughter. Instead, what comes to mind is hip-hop, neo-soul, go-go, crunk, and R&B. The games black girls play —handclapping game-songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope—may not even register as a kind of popular music because the term is chiefly reserved for commercial productions often dominated by men. Commercial popular music tends to exclude or simply incorporate the communal or everyday forms of popular music that cannot be assigned individual authorship or ownership: no royalties for the song-makers of doubledutch . But everyday, black girls generate and pass on a unique repertoire of chants and embodied rhythms in their play that both reflects and inspires the principles of black popular music-making. This book is about those games: the musical games that are passed down by word of mouth and body, beyond the scope of Billboard charts and Soundscan. Listen in on girls’ daily broadcasts from the playground and you’ll hear more than “nonsense.” You’ll hear a sophisticated approach to nonverbal syllables that mirror the melodic and linguistic approaches found in jive talk, scatting, and the verbal freestyling of hip-hop. Watch their daily routines, which mix colloquial gestures and verbal expressions, and you’ll be hooked on their fascinating rhythms, their use of call-and-response from word to body, and their rap-like manipulation of phonics and rhymes just for the fun of it. Feel the finger-snapping, handclapping, thigh-pattin’, chest-thumping, and foot-stomping and grasp the friction of their embodied cross-rhythms and social “rhythm sections.” Girls be doing it up like they were making the latest hits for popular broadcast. 1 At first it may seem that girls are emulating the music from radio and TV. But what if girls are also initiating the textures that inspire the music we hear commercially? This is a story about the performance and politics of race, gender, and the body in African American vernacular and popular music. It is also a contribution to rethinking the ways we have represented blackness and gender in musicological studies, offering an empowering way to approach it in the future. If we were to re-examine the aesthetics of African American musical style and practice from the ethnographic perspective of black females’ participation, we’d find that African American girls embody the ideals of black music-making in the games they play: syncopation and rhythmic complexity spark handclapping and foot-stomping; call-and-response distinguishes the linguistic and musical interactions between their voices and bodies in group play; and a highly percussive approach to singing or chanting is prevalent. Drawing upon several years of participant observation, and on my own childhood experience performing African American girls’ musical games, I demonstrate how black musical style and behavior are learned through oral-kinetic practices that not only teach an embodied discourse of black musical expression, but also inherently teach discourse about appropriate and transgressive gender and racial roles (for both girls and boys) in African American communities. Based on this premise, I elucidate different aspects of the musical lives of African American girls and the women who affectionately call one another “girl” throughout their lives. The musical games black girls play offer a unique site for analyzing and understanding how syncopation, sophisticated gestures or everyday choreography, and linguistic, melodic, and rhythmic aspects of improvisation are learned and socialized through “in-body formulas” (Drewal 1992). These formulas, which I call “oral-kinetic etudes,” function as lessons in black musical style and taste. While the embodied musical practices performed by girls are ordinarily visible in African American neighborhoods and urban communities, the appropriation of black girls’ musical game-songs by male commercial artists is often overlooked. It makes sense that girls borrow from, say, hiphop or R&B, or that the folklore of girls’ musical play is a repository of ideas from mass-mediated realms of music and dance. But what do we make of hip-hop, an art form predominantly associated with males and masculinity, sampling from the familiar chants and beats of a female mu2 | Introduction [44.210.120.182] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:28 GMT) sical expression? Are men incorporating the...