This review was originally published in NEPCA Journal and is republished by author permission.
What do you think of this/What do you think of that/Saw your
mama’s picture in the dictionary/Beside the word “fat.”
That little snippet of doggerel is all I recall from
childhood battles in which the choice was put up your fists or shoot off your
mouth. The rule was that if someone bested you verbally, you weren’t allowed to
beat them up. That was good news for a scrawny brat such as I, who was better
at quick wit than a fast left hook. When I got to college and read folklorist
Roger Abrahams, I learned I had been playing a sanitized white version of the
Dozens, an African-American insult duel. I probably picked it up from the black
kids at my elementary school.
As Elijah Wald, a Los Angeles-based musician and writer,
shows, the Dozens are in lots of places you might not expect. Modified versions
show up in the poems of Langston Hughes, the novels of Richard Wright and Zora
Neale Hurston, and in the black comedy routines of Red Foxx and the white ones
of George Carlin. You find the Dozens in the blues repertoires of artists
ranging from Jelly Roll Morton and Big Bill Broonzy to Lonnie Johnson and Rudy
Ray Moore. And, as Wald’s subtitle suggests, it’s alive and well in
contemporary rap and hip-hop.
Lesson one: Don’t assume that surfaces are depth. Remember
when Tipper Gore crusaded against obscene music lyrics? She wasn’t the only
one. Gangsta rap, in particular, has come under fire for its lascivious
language and messages of violence. Gore was right to think that a lot of street
prose is painted blue, but she (and other critics) badly misunderstood how rap
lyrics function. The surface messages are aggressive, provocative, and salacious,
but remember: If you bust a rhyme that can’t be answered and you resort to
physical retaliation, you lose. Rappers often defame each other in verse, but
these slams seldom result in actual violence.
Wald draws upon the works of anthropologists, folklorists,
and music scholars, but he also mines his own extensive knowledge and
collection of blues recordings. Adding the latter might well make his book the
new standard for studying the Dozens. If it fails on that level, it’s because
Wald doubts that one can definitively trace the origins of the Dozens. He
suspects it’s a holdover from African traditions, but he’s also aware that his
sources have been bowdlerized by both collectors and by community members
uncomfortable the content of the Dozens. Wald is on stronger turf when
documenting the myriad ways verbal jousting has expressed itself in the
African-American community. Second
lesson: Don’t leave this book lying around where young prying eyes can peruse
it. The Dozens Wald documents are ribald and raw. One can readily see why the
Family Values crowd turns crimson—the imagery is sexually graphic, demeaning,
and veers over the edge of a misogynist precipice. But remember lesson one:
It’s not meant to be taken literally. The Dozens, whether a schoolyard boast or
a rap bust, might be assertions of
hyper-masculinity or the cultural coping mechanisms of repressed social groups,
but quite often they’re nothing more than a particularly naughty game.
Lesson three: Comedy isn’t pretty. Do the Dozens or rap
lyrics make you uncomfortable? Does the answer to that question even matter?
Personal views don’t alter the reality of a cultural tradition that’s been
around for centuries, whether in the PG-13 versions of childhood bouts such as
mine, or in the NC-17 raps of 2 Live Crew. Jay-Z astutely observed that rap
shouldn’t be compared to other genres of music because “it’s really most like a
sport. Boxing to be exact. The stamina, the one-man army, the combat aspect of
it, the ring, the stage…” (185).
Wald’s study has blind spots. He’s open to the charge of
being so enamored of the “dirty” Dozens that he sacrifices clever wordplay in
favor of the graphic stuff. Folklorists might also take umbrage with eliding
the Dozens—which are usually rhymed—with other insult games (snaps, retorts,
one-liners). It’s not clear, for example, that “Yo Mama” jokes are truncated
versions of the Dozens. (Indeed, I used to steal Groucho Marx zingers if I
needed a quick one-and-done snap. Verbal jousts were longer, more complex, and
involved more audience engagement.) One also longs for Wald to offer
conclusions more substantive than an admission that he isn’t sure why the
Dozens have endured. In like fashion, Wald’s downplay of surface content seems
overly apologetic in the face of feminist assertions that rap is misogynist. It’s
simply hard to ignore that the Dozens often target females and female bodies.
But credit Wald with connecting the dotted notes when it
comes to music. If you want to do more than lament the content of hip-hop and
rap, you need to learn how to play the Dozens.
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