Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  Alton Ellis’s ‘Rock Steady’ (1966) was the first song to name-check the new type of slower rhythm which came to be known as rocksteady, while another early release in that style, Dandy Livingstone’s ‘Rudy, A Message To You’ (1967), helped popularise the Jamaican slang name for the tough rude boys, or rudies, found in the dance halls of Kingston and on the streets. A decade later, during the reggae/punk crossover era in which the deejay at Covent Garden punk club The Roxy was Rastafarian Don Letts, and even Bob Marley was moved to record a song entitled ‘Punky Reggae Party’, the phrase was used by David Mingay and Jack Hazan as the title to their documentary film about The Clash, Rude Boy (1980).

  By this stage, certain Rasta words – such as dreadlocks for their distinctive hairstyle – had become internationally known owing to the popularity of reggae music. Indeed, one incidental pleasure of reading the NME in the late 1970s was observing the unconvincing spectacle of a portion of their mostly white British staff peppering their reviews in all musical genres with Rasta and rude boy slang from Jamaica’s Trenchtown district, such as irie (good), bloodclaat (an insult, literally meaning sanitary towel) or I and I (me), and occasionally rounding off their pieces with the expression seen?, meaning ‘have I made myself clear?’

  The word Babylon in Rasta terms usually referred to the system, the government or the police, as opposed to what was seen as the higher authority of their religion, or more loosely it stood for Western society generally, hence the title of Bob Marley’s 1978 live tour LP Babylon By Bus. Given the word’s biblical origins, it is not a surprise to find it being used a decade earlier in a non-reggae context, in this exchange from Edward S. Hanlon’s 1968 novel of New York flower-power dropout slum dwellers, The Great God Now:

  ‘You know what the hippie is, Leo?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s God’s warning to Babylon.’

  Similarly, Eldridge Cleaver used the word in his 1969 book Soul on Ice, when summing up the attitude of armed black militant resistance to the Vietnam war:

  Why not die right here in Babylon fighting for a better life, like the Viet Cong? If those little cats can do it, what’s wrong with big studs like us?

  As for the term reggae itself, this dates back to the appearance in 1968 – in a slight variant spelling – of the single ‘Do The Reggay’ by The Maytals, and then, in the same year, another Jamaican vocal group, The Tennors, released a song called ‘Reggae Girl’.

  Sound system deejays such as Count Machuki and King Stitt began speaking and vocally improvising over records at live shows from the late 1950s onwards, inspired by jive-talking US jazz and R&B deejays. A decade later, such experiments were finding their way onto records, and the talkover style itself was named toasting, a direct forerunner of hip-hop rapping. Toasters such as U-Roy would vocalise over pre-existing tracks and rhythms which were often several years old, and producers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Clancy Eccles or Duke Reid became pioneers in that field, often stripping the tracks down to the essential drum and bass rhythms. Years later, in 1984, television presenter Jools Holland visited Jamaica to film a special reggae report for the Channel Four music show The Tube. Standing with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry outside the gates to the producer’s house, Holland asked about the significance of a rusting item of kitchen hardware impaled on the spiked railings of the outside wall. With unerring logic, Lee replied, ‘It say that I am a toaster, and I am not a boaster, but a positive toaster.’

  To pitch a boogie

  THE LANGUAGE OF JAZZ has repeatedly surfaced in the music business, sometimes in ever more disconnected ways. Indeed, when Clarence Pine Top Smith recorded his landmark driving barrelhouse piano composition ‘Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie’ back in December 1928, he not only laid down one of the definitive building blocks which would lead to up-tempo rhythm and blues and then rock’n’roll, he also comprehensively launched the slang word boogie, which has since travelled on a very long, strange course as a general term for dance and dancing. When one of the giants of the field, boogie pianist Albert Ammons, was interviewed by Doyle K. Getter of the Milwaukee Journal in 1943, he said that before the term existed, this style was known among players by a different name, heavy bass. As the article explained, ‘the phrase “to pitch a boogie” for years in Chicago’s Negro belt had simply meant “to throw a party”’. (The piece also mentioned that other musicians would have a jam with pianist Pete Johnson and his band – another jazz term which has stayed the course, among other things providing the name for Paul Weller’s group in Woking three decades later.)

  Big band boogie-woogie was one of the dominant sounds of the Second World War era, and, in country music, a parallel style known as hillbilly boogie developed in the late 1940s, while with the release of ‘Boogie Chillun’ (1948), John Lee Hooker began a lifelong association with the word throughout his illustrious career. By the 1970s, it could mean many things. There were long-haired good ol’ boys down in Georgia playing a style which became known as southern boogie, but disco and funk outfits also developed a lasting fondness for the word as the decade progressed: ‘Get Up And Boogie’ (Silver Convention, 1976), ‘Boogie Nights’ (Heatwave, 1977), ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ (Baccara, 1977), ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ (A Taste of Honey, 1978), ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ (The Jacksons, 1978) and ‘Boogie Wonderland’ (Earth, Wind & Fire, 1979), to name just some of the obvious examples.

  Since hip-hop music began its ascent in the wake of key releases such as the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ (1979) and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ (1982) – both of them released and co-written by Sugarhill Records label owner Sylvia Robinson, who in the mid-1950s had been one half of the superb R&B vocal duo Mickey & Sylvia – rap musicians have also demonstrated an enduring allegiance to the word boogie. There was New York hip-hop outfit The Boogie Boys (who had a hit called ‘A Fly Girl’ in 1985), and the same year also saw the formation of influential South Bronx group Boogie Down Productions, while contemporary hip-hop includes artists such as the succinctly named Boogie (with his song ‘Bitter Raps’, 2014) and also A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, whose repertoire includes the song ‘DTB’ (a title explained in the lyric, fuck bitches . . . I don’t trust bitches).

  As mentioned in earlier chapters, the slang word fly was in use in London two hundred years ago, and is recorded in the third edition of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811):

  FLY. Knowing, Acquainted with another’s meaning or proceeding.

  By the time of the fourth edition, revised by Pierce Egan in 1823, the definition had expanded to also include the following: ‘vigilant, suspicious, cunning, not easily robbed or duped; a shop-keeper or person of this description is called a fly cove, or a leary cove’, Which, of course, would make them, as California punk band The Offspring might have said in 1998, ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’ (1998). As it happens, running parallel to the word’s frequent use in black 20th-century popular music – such as Martha Copeland’s 1928 blues recording ‘I Ain’t Your Hen, Mister Fly Rooster’ – the word had never really gone out of fashion in England during that time. For instance, in Margery Allingham’s 1948 detective novel More Work for the Undertaker, one character says of her regular aristocratic sleuth, ‘He’s very fly, is Mr Campion,’ and then, a quarter of a century later, the word occurs in a conversation between two of the stalwarts of John Le Carré’s largely public school espionage team in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), when Connie says to Smiley, ‘Not that Aleksey Aleksandrovitch would have fallen for that, mind. Aleks was far too fly.’

  Another slang term much used in hip-hop circles, and with a similarly venerable history, is the business of calling your apartment your crib. In medieval England, the word was applied to the wooden stalls in which farmyard animals slept, but by Shakespeare’s time it could also mean a small rough dwelling for human habitation. Eventually, it was established English criminal slang for a home. Once again, Pierce Egan’s 1823 version of the Vulg
ar Tongue gives the details of its use as burglar’s terminology:

  CRIB. A house. To crack a crib: to break open a house.

  The term’s journey to America can be logged, for instance, by its appearance in the glossary of Josiah Flynt’s 1901 study of criminal life, The World of Graft, where he defines a crib specifically as a gambling dive, and in which fly-cop is slang for a detective, and to squeal on a fellow crook is also to rap. By 1967, crib could be found in Trick Baby, where a character fresh out of prison asks an acquaintance for help finding a place to stay:

  I gotta find a crib. I went to Thirty-seventh Street to find my foster-folks, but they’ve moved. Johnny, I’m glad you’ve got a short [a car], maybe you can help me find a crib and a clean two-buck broad.

  His rap is strong

  THE WORD RAP ITSELF has been slang for centuries, denoting all manner of things. For example, in the time of Henry VIII, the OED informs us, it meant ‘the act of breaking wind’, whereas in the Canting Crew slang dictionary of 1699, a rapper was ‘a swinging great Lie’.

  The generally accepted first use of the word rap in the modern context in a song lyric occurs in the 1965 song ‘Michael (The Lover)’, by Chicago soul vocal trio the C.O.D.s, a Motown-influenced romantic dance number all about a smooth-talking charmer – ‘the girls think that his rap is strong’ – written by band member Michael Brownlee. Here was a song about a lover, not a fighter, but this was also a time when the civil rights struggle in America was making headlines, and a new mood was apparent on the city streets. The 25 August 1965 issue of Life magazine featured fifteen pages of riot photographs from the Watts district of Los Angeles following a week of unrest that month in which thirty-four people died, using headlines that highlighted some of the new words and slogans that were emerging: ‘In A Roaring Inferno “Burn, Baby, Burn”’ and ‘“Get Whitey!” The War Cry That Terrorized Los Angeles’. Reporter Marc Crawford and his photographer, both of whom were black, encountered some people who were in the middle of setting fire to a supermarket:

  At last, ‘Whitey’ was reacting to them. Set a fire and Whitey has to take cognizance of you: Whitey’s buildings were burning. ‘I wouldn’t give a goddam if they burned my house down as long as I could get his,’ one Negro said. ‘Mine ain’t worth a damn nohow. He’s the one with everything to lose.’

  The word whitey was enjoying a revival around this time, but a century before this it had been in use both in America and also in the early days of colonial Australia and New Zealand. Edwin Hodder, in his 1862 book Memories of New Zealand Life, records it being used by the indigenous population a generation or so earlier, while discussing the unsuitability of some of the newly arrived settlers as a food resource: ‘If a Maori is asked if he “would like a whitey-man for ki-ki (food),” he will always answer, “Whitey-man no good ki-ki – too much the salt,” it being generally believed among them that the immense quantity of salt consumed by the Europeans permeates their whole system.’

  A year after Watts, the Guardian’s reporter Clyde Sanger returned to see how the district was faring, and commented on two of the new phrases being used on the streets:

  The slogan ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ was coined in those flames to hold currency until superseded this summer [1966] by ‘black power’.

  A month earlier, the latter phrase had been the subject of an editorial in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People):

  ‘black’ and ‘power,’ perfectly good words alone or in certain combinations, but loaded with racial dynamite when joined together in the phrase ‘black power.’ Like ‘white supremacy,’ it is a polarizing concept not only setting black against white and vice versa, but also black against all nonblacks. This is a late day for the Negro to start emulating the most despicable characteristic of certain white people. In a pluralistic society, the slogan ‘black power’ is as unacceptable as ‘white supremacy’.

  Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!

  OTHER PEOPLE AT THAT TIME had different ideas, and 1966 was also the year which saw the formation of the Black Panther Party, a movement which would later have a significant influence on hip-hop, not least in the language they employed, in particular on the band Public Enemy. While the phrase burn, baby, burn had appeared in a different context in songs such as ‘Disco Inferno’ (The Trammps, 1976), Chuck D and Public Enemy made an explicit connection with the black nationalism of the 1960s, and one member, Professor Griff, was designated as ‘Minister of Information’, the same title which Eldridge Cleaver had held in the Panthers in the late 1960s. For some months in 1967 and 1968, there had been attempts to align the Black Panthers with the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee), led by Stokely Carmichael, who was a member of both organisations. He was succeeded in the latter organisation by the tellingly named H Rap Brown, who briefly served as Minister of Justice for the Panthers. Commenting on how Brown came by this name, a 1971 profile in the Sarasota Herald Tribune had this to say, by which time he was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list:

  Born Hubert Gerold Brown, he earned the name ‘Rap’ because his fiery, persuasive speeches caused audiences to shout, ‘Rap it to ’em, baby.’ The tall, gangling leader became known as a militant firebrand who referred to whites as ‘honkies’.

  Honky was another interesting word which floated up through the black subculture in the second half of the 1960s. Black writer, folk singer and SNCC photographer Julius Lester summarised the linguistic situation as follows in his 1968 book Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!:

  As Malcolm X once said, everything south of the Canadian border was South. There was only up-South and down-South now, and the whites in both places were ‘crackers.’ No more did you hear black people talk about ‘the white man’ or ‘Mr Charlie.’ It went from ‘white man’ to ‘whitey; from ‘Mr Charlie’ to ‘Chuck.’ From there he was depersonalised and called ‘the man,’ until in 1967 he would be totally destroyed by the one violent word, ‘honky’!

  This 1960s world of black activism and revolutionary talk was a familiar part of the household in which the young Chuck D was growing up, a decade and a half before he co-founded his hip-hop group Public Enemy, and there are sections on the official Public Enemy website today giving biographies of people like Eldridge Cleaver. The word honky as a term for white people has largely fallen from use in the intervening years since the 1960s – although the Beastie Boys released a B-side called ‘Honky Rink’ in 1992 which included the phrase white people only – but Chuck D employed it repeatedly in a song from the recent Public Enemy LP, Man Plans God Laughs (2015), entitled ‘Honky Talk Rules’.

  Both Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys were stalwarts of the Def Jam record label in the 1980s, which was founded by Rick Rubin in his room, number 712 of the Weinstein Dorm, on the campus at NYU in 1984. The following year – having already entered into business partnership with hip-hop promoter Russell Simmons (brother of DJ Run of the group Run DMC) – Rubin struck a deal with CBS Records for what he described at the time as ‘a whole lot of money’. The label name derives from black slang, def for great, superb, jam meaning record, and this choice of words – especially the initials – were crucial, as Rubin told Rolling Stone in 2014: ‘The logo was a big “D” and a big “J” and it really was about the DJ’s place in hip-hop, being, in a way, equal to that of the emcees.’ Flushed with their early successes with acts such as LL Cool J, the label took out a full page in Billboard magazine in April 1985, which simply said:

  DEF JAM RECORDINGS

  Our Artists Speak For Themselves

  (‘Cause They Can’t Sing.)

  Yet again, though, the slang word def was one of those which had been floating around in jazz circles for some decades. Consider the very fine nineteen-minute short film Ovoutee Orooney (1947), which preserves a performance of the Slim Gaillard Trio at Billy Berg’s Club in Hollywood the previous year, in which Slim holds forth in the vout slang language of his o
wn devising.

  The rolling opening titles go into some detail about what it terms his slanguage, before concluding:

  IT’S

  OUT

  OF

  THIS

  WORLD. . . BUT DEF.

  Here, though, the word def would seem to be an abbreviation of definitely, whereas the OED gives the derivation of the hip-hop word as probably being a variant of the word death, which was how the linguistic commentator of the New York Times, William Safire, explained it in 1982, an ironic reversal whereby death is seen favourably, in the same way that the slang term bad meant good.

  Fur Q

  WHILE THE LANGUAGE OF BLACK POWER informed some of the more political hip-hop of the 1980s, by the early 1990s some sections of the genre had also become associated with the language of almost cartoon violence and sexism. In a 1992 episode of the BBC2 satirical TV series The Day Today, Chris Morris appeared as a fictitious rapper named Fur Q, talking about his habit of shooting random audience members, and seen firing a machine gun while singing a song called ‘Uzi Lover’, with its heart-warming sample lyric, cock, bitch, cock, bitch, motherfucker, Outlining his philosophy, he explains, ‘You gotta kill people, to have respect for people.’ If this sounds like a caricature, well, obviously, it is, but at the time of writing there is a North Philadelphia rapper called Lil’ Uzi Vert – often referred to simply as Uzi – with songs like ‘Moist’ (2015), which talks about counting large amounts of money, throws in the word niggas, and claims bitches would like to suck him, and his voice makes them moist.

  As for the word respect, it has come a long way since Otis Redding and then Aretha Franklin were asking for it back in 1965 and 1967. That song was all about mutual fairness in a relationship, but in street slang in recent decades respect has broadened out into a general term of approval, while the demand for respect has often been used as a thinly veiled excuse for a fight, when a person thinks they have been dissed (disrespected) by someone. Not everyone was demanding respect at the time that Otis wrote that song. Here, for instance, is working-class cockney-geezer-about-town Alfie, whose exploits began as a 1963 play of the same name by Bill Naughton, which he adapted into a novel in 1966, the year it was filmed with Michael Caine in the title role. At one point in the book, after a girlfriend says of another of her boyfriends that she doesn’t love him, ‘but I do respect him’, Alfie thinks this to himself: