The Dozens

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Following his groundbreaking explorations of the blues and American popular music in Escaping the Delta and How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, Elijah Wald turns his attention to the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that ruled urban neighborhoods long before rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game called "the dozens."At its simplest, the dozens 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 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 from Jelly Roll Morton to Ice Cube. Wald 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 comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and most recently in the improvisatory battling of rap. A forbidden language beneath 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 fascinating new light on schoolyard games and rural work songs, serious literature and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap.

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Genre : Humor
Author : Elijah Wald
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Release : 2012-06
File : 258 Pages
ISBN-13 : 9780199895403


Biennial Report Of The State Board Of Supervision Of Wisconsin Charitable Reformatory And Penal Institutions

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Genre : Prisons
Author : State Board of Supervision of Wisconsin Charitable, Reformatory, and Penal Institutions
Publisher :
Release : 1882
File : 352 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015074672315


The New Theoretical And Practical Complete Book Keeping

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Genre : Accounting
Author : Louis Lafayette Williams
Publisher :
Release : 1893
File : 306 Pages
ISBN-13 : NYPL:33433020441501


House Documents

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Genre :
Author :
Publisher :
Release : 1895
File : 1052 Pages
ISBN-13 : BSB:BSB11549079


Annual Reports Of The City Departments Of The City Of Cincinnati

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Genre :
Author : Cincinnati (Ohio)
Publisher :
Release : 1887
File : 1032 Pages
ISBN-13 : CHI:39694125


Documents Of The City Of Boston

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Genre : Boston (Mass.)
Author : Boston (Mass.). City Council
Publisher :
Release : 1895
File : 1760 Pages
ISBN-13 : UOM:39015068187361


Biennial Report Of The Department Of Statistics For

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Genre : Indiana
Author : Indiana. Department of Statistics
Publisher :
Release : 1891
File : 522 Pages
ISBN-13 : HARVARD:LI1MJX


Practical Arithmetic For Senior Classes

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Genre :
Author : Henry G. C. SMITH
Publisher :
Release : 1872
File : 238 Pages
ISBN-13 : BL:A0025188698


Annual Report Of The Department Of Statistics

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Genre : Indiana
Author : Indiana. Department of Statistics
Publisher :
Release : 1885
File : 582 Pages
ISBN-13 : HARVARD:LI1MJK


Annual Report Of The Department Of Statistics And Geology

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Genre : Indiana
Author : Indiana. Bureau of Statistics
Publisher :
Release : 1883
File : 568 Pages
ISBN-13 : STANFORD:36105119335359