Dyson 2003 Welcome to the Jam.pdf - Oncourse

“Welcome to the Jam”
anne haas dyson
Playing with Voices
The actual media source of the teenager music, the radio, provided a context
for a form of dress-up play: radio play. A radio show became a set of diverse
and interrelated practices, including interviewing, song announcing, deejay
joking, and star performing. Radio play (i.e., enacting these practices) happened
mainly on the playground, unlike group singing, and usually involved
just girls. (The boys tended to play team sports.) In the brief excerpt below,
from playground radio play, Denise interviews herself:
Denise:
Denise:
(assuming a polite, interested tone) Denise. Tell us why do you like to
sing — and your friends?
(rapping) We want to be a star/ In the store
We want to be on stage/ For our cage.
Children used different song genres for different contexts. One day Denise
and Vanessa were concerned about a classmate’s “spying” on them. During recess,
Denise made up a rap about this situation — in my view, a perfect genre
choice, given her intense irritation. Her rap contains a driving beat and an aggressive
tone, and to maintain this she works to sustain a pattern of syllable
stresses and rhymes. Following is just a small sample of this long rap:
Denise:
It’s called, “Why You in My Bus’ness?” (sternly)
(rapping) Why you in my bus’ness?
Cause I got you/ In my far-is-mus
And I had you/ In my char-is-mus/ my bus’ness
Why you gotta be/ In the bus’ness?
In another playground performance, Denise participated in the collaborative
composing of a love song; Vanessa, as lead singer, improvised the song, as
Denise and Wenona sang back-up:
Vanessa: I’m gonna sing um a make-up [improvised] song. Y’all gonna sing with
me, right?
Denise and Wenona: Yeah.
Denise:
Wenona:
Vanessa:
Wenona:
Vanessa:
Denise:
Vanessa:
What do you want us to say?
(AndwhenVanessahasnoparticulardirectivetooffer...)
We gonna say “I love you.”
Yeah.
Heck no!
Yeah.
No no no. (firmly)
We gonna say, “Baby.” (definitively)
No. (equally definitively)
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