I posted an appeal to Instagram, asking for help identifying something by Young Jeezy. Last year I found myself wondering about one such song. How I loved the Jumprope Boys, and that song (with accompanying dance) “Jump the Rope.” Who were those young men? (When I asked someone what had happened to them, all I was told was that they were “Brittny’s friends.”) Or “Check My Footwork” a DC-adjacent, feet-beating track that got quickly remixed into “Check My Facebook”: “Ye ain’t friend me, Ye ain’t poke me / Stop looking at my pic ’cause Ye ain’t know me.” What happened to those songs? That’s what I noticed that semester: New York was just now hearing songs I had heard six months earlier.īut there were whole tracks, whole branches of the genre, that didn’t make it out of the A. If Soulja Boy released a song, it took some time to swim upstream from Atlanta. Talking to strangers, sharing unfounded opinions, wasn’t as simple as it is now. They sometimes had DJs but the Southern music they played was… delayed. This was 2007.
Columbia parties were different-they were in the dorms, and often got shut down by campus police. I spent the fall of my junior year taking classes in New York, hanging out with all the black people who wanted to be hung out with. My mother had the mashed potato, the popcorn, the jerk. I was at the women’s college whose students had once vanquished tip-drilling Nelly from campus during his own bone marrow drive! The problem was that, though the songs were about nothing more than women and clubbing and money, they were catchy. My mother lamented that my generation would have no true music to look back upon, as if George Clinton weren’t famous for singing about a flashlight.īut even amongst ourselves, debate raged-were these songs dumb? There were so many of them-“Snap Yo Fingers,” “Wait (The Whisper Song),” “Knuck if You Buck,” “Oh I Think They Like Me,” and, as I recall, both “Ho Sit Down” and “Do Your Dance on That Ho.” They certainly were misogynistic. My roommate, who didn’t say it but really wanted me to know she was blacker than me, insisted that the dance we had all started doing-a three-beat shuffle, a ti-ti-ta, ti-ti-ta-was not called the Laffy Taffy, just set to a song by the same name.
It sounded like it had been made on a Casio keyboard, two index fingers jabbing out a two-note beat. All through my teenage years I had been trapped in cycles of Wilco and Modest Mouse, Parliament and Oscar Peterson I was not prepared for Atlanta at the dawn of snap music.ĭ4L’s “Shake Dat Laffy Taffy” was the first of those songs I remember. I was almost afraid to speak, for fear of what new ignorance I might reveal. You’re from Maine? people kept saying, underlined and italicized. On the first day of college, I asked a black man from Brooklyn to Harlem Shake for me. It’s incredible to think of what I didn’t know then.
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