Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap

Waldis your only plausible tour guide, capable of illuminating both the blunt simplicity and fraught complexity, the cheerful frivolity and deadly severity of it all." --Rob Harvilla, Spin Magazine"Like yo mama - short but thick, a good trick, and easy to get all the way through." --Harper's Magazine"The author's affection and respect for this strange, unheralded current of folk culture shine through every word of his book." --Washington Post"A lively and engaging history of the oral insult game Wald is a respected historian of American music and has authoritatively mastered (and clearly summarizes) the vast research on the Dozens." --San Francisco Chronicle"This impeccably researched study of the clas

He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.. His ten published books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: AnAlternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. Elijah Wald

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. 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. Wald traces the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that has ruled urban neighborhoods since the early 1900s. At its most complex, it's an intricate form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. 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 'Bout 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 doz

much dap and Props on this book i been doing the dozens for many moons against turkeys. i told a turkey once that his Mamma was so dumb that she thought IQ was a Ward in the Hospital, she was walking toward the doctor talking about my tummy hurts i need to be checked into the IQ Ward.mama clowin ain't never gonna go outta style. your mamma is so crossed eyed that she saw both the North and South Pole at once.these are must have books and will crack you up.. You did not talk about your mama enough. Why Lewis D. You did not talk about your mama enough. Why don't you stick up for yourself and stop crying. You're scared.