Language, meaning, modernity, and doowop*

DAVID SAMUELS

Hana mana ganda, hana mana ganda, we translate for you Hana means what mana means, and ganda means that, too. What Makes the Red Man Red? Peter Pan (Disney 1954) . . . [T]here is a philosophy of language implicit in the very word nonsense . . . Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Introduction: The Cellos In March 1957, Apollo Records in New York released a single by a doowop quintet called the Cellos. The song, Rang Tang Ding Dong (I Am the Japanese Sandman), was written by Alvin Williams, the bass singer of the group, which was composed of students at Charles Evans Hughes High School on West 18th Street in Manhattan. The single was a minor hit for the group, rising as high as number 62 on the Billboard pop charts. Since then, the reception and circulation of Rang Tang Ding Dong have run along two parallel and contradictory tracks, invoking a twinned memorableness and dismissability of the song. On the one hand, the record has proven distinctly memorable. It has been anthologized in a number of important collections of early rock and roll, and its title was quoted by Frank Zappa at the end of Joes Garage (1979). On the other hand, the record is remembered today as a wild novelty. Greil Marcus (1999), writing for Salon.com, called it one of the most ridiculous records ever made. Given this judgment of history, it may be doubly ridiculous for me to try to extract any seriousness from the whole business. So let me try to enunciate a bit what the stakes are in making the attempt. What does doowop say about language and language ideologies? In the distinction between language and non-language, we nd resonances of
Semiotica 1491/4 (2004), 297323 00371998/04/01490297 6 Walter de Gruyter

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one key area of European rationalist ideology. Where did this modern notion of language come from? Can we trace its history? This article is a rst attempt at doing so. Important work in language ideology (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Kroskrity 2000) has established the intimate relationship between power, ideology, and the usage of or critical stance toward varieties of language. In what follows, I want to take a step back from that valuable discussion to explore the question of how a notion of language was carved from the ow of semiotic practices in modernizing Europe. Part of the answer to these questions lies in the reception that doowop received as it circulated in contemporary cultural contexts during the mid- to late-twentieth century. By situating my discussion at the nexus of these contradictory paths the memorability of dismissible nonsense and novelty I hope to use this particular song, and the marginalized genre of which it is a token, to uncover and address modernitys naturalization of a relationship between language, semantics, and sense.1 Like the distinction between sonorousness and noise that lies at the heart of culturally naturalized ideologies of music, I claim that a distinction between sense and nonsense lies at the heart of modernitys sense of what language is.2 One part of my discussion will look at how, in the context of modernity, some utterances become framed as dismissible novelties, jokes, and nonsense. Another part will concern how nonsense oers a possible critical perspective on modern ideologies of the desire for a semantic transparency of language. What makes Rang Tang Ding Dong such a memorable 2 minute 45 second joy ride? The song begins rather typically in one of the traditions of doowop: the use of vocables in order to represent the incomprehensible languages of Others.3 Doubtless this linguistic practice is itself worthy of further investigation. But I want to attend to a moment of linguistic consciousness about the division of labor between language and nonsense syllables that appears with about a minute left in the song. At around the 1:50 mark of the song, a member of the Cellos stages one of the more famous breakdowns in the history of rock and roll. Frustrated with his role in the performance, this background singer refuses to go on, complaining about the quality of what he gets to sing versus what the others get to sing. His objection is:
Man, all you guys get to say the big things. All I get to say is . . .

. . . and then the song resumes, the rang tang, ding dong, ranky sank chorus virtuosically motoring to the nal fade. What is this complaint about everybody else getting to say the big things? Indeed, what are the big things? It doesnt require too large a

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leap of faith to conclude that, for the rebellious singer, the big things are words the lexical items that carry semantic and referential meaning. Rang Tang Ding Dong pushes that notion to the edge, if not over it, insofar as the words that constitute the big things here consist of such lines as, I wear a pin-striped jacket made of chunky foo-yang. In contrast, the little things are the semantically and referentially empty nonsense vocables rang tang ding dong that are among the most prominent vocal and stylistic aspects of the song, and of doowop singing more generally. The moment of interruption in Rang Tang Ding Dong encapsulates a political and aesthetic consciousness about the relationship between doowops expressive practices and the constitution of language and communication. It raises the naturalization of semantic meaning as the mark of legitimacy in linguistic practice as a topic for critical reection and metadiscursive performance. Doowop disrespects a master trope of modernity: that language is a tool for clear and transparent communication. Or perhaps it is safer to say the modern version of the trope; for it undoubtedly has a lengthy history in the Western intellectual tradition. One consequence of this trope is that modernitys critical focus on language is most salient at the level of code, and what the code purports to represent a means by which symbols can stand for things in the world. And the contact between codes was an increasingly prominent feature of European consciousness of language beginning in the seventeenth century. At that code-level, the stark, zero-sum, evolve-or-die picture presented by Derrida in Monolingualism of the Other (1998) is undeniably prominent in thinking about the relationship between languages, and is dicult to deny. Yet, it is challenged by various theories of mediation in practice: diglossia, code-switching, creolization, hybridity. At another remove, however, Derridas compelling model assumes that languages are in toto lexico-sytactic codes. When we think about the problem of modernity and language, however, we ought also to think about how that problem is constituted not only in practices of using marginalized codes, but in practices that conict with dominant ideologies of what language and code are in the rst place, as well. I contend that marginalized communities undercut ideologies of language even as those dominant languages are being used (willingly or unwillingly) in those communities (Samuels 2001; Nevins 2002). This undercutting takes place in performance of the tension between meaning and nonsense that modernity sets up. Through virtuosic practices of incomprehensibility vocables, puns, mispronunciations marginalized social and linguistic groups demonstrate the price at which modernitys notions of coherence

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and meaning have been purchased. That is, even as standard or national languages have intensied and tightened their grips on the worlds marginalized peoples, those people nd ways to back-talk the processes of linguistic modernity (Stewart 1990).4 Language and modernity The problem of language and modernity resonates powerfully with the unprecedented language contact of early European colonization and globalization. Eurocentric critical perspectives on sense and nonsense emerged out of interpersonal and interlinguistic problems of communication in The Age of Exploration. Indeed, the rst documented instances of the words sense and nonsense being attached to questions of linguistic signication occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. At that time, various heterogeneous linguistic practices began to come under new forms of scrutiny, policy, and policing.5 This scrutiny connects the problem of language and modernity to the simultaneously developing problems of nation and of identity, and to the way in which problems of nation were expressed through grappling with the problem of homogeneity and heterogeneity. In his work on the development of statistics, Ian Hacking frames this shift as in some sense concerned with what we may call the erosion of determinism (Hacking 1991: 185; emphasis in original). Modernizing European states used statistics to produce knowable, quantiable, and diagnostic norms of cultural and social existence in order to contend with the possibility that real chance exists and is part of the underlying structure of the world (1991: 185). Hacking traces a growing acknowledgement of indeterminacy throughout the nineteenth century and sees in the development of statistics a means for the taming of chance (Hacking 1991: 194). This entwinement of indeterminacy and rationalization nds interesting resonance in the realm of language and semiotics; two of the key gures in the development of modern theories of language and symbol were immersed in the world of statistical probability: Benjamin Lee Whorf in the world of actuarial tables at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company (Lavery 2000) and Charles Sanders Peirce in the intellectual world of mathematical probability theory (Menand 2001: 151200).6 What are the chances of that? Sense in language and literature The emergent conjoining of the oppositional distinctions between sense and nonsense, determinacy and indeterminacy, science and sensuousness

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can be read through a number of resonances in the history of modern European literature and criticism. Again, while these oppositions are hardly unique to this period, there are particularities to the scope of the issues of indeterminacy and nonsense beginning around the turn of the seventeenth century that mirror, in many ways, those surrounding the rise of statistics and the problem of cultural unity in the development of modern nationalism discussed above. I will trace these through a discussion of philology and dictionary-making and through an exploration of shifting ideologies around the notion of punning. Concerns over the potential consistent meanings of national communities had practical as well as theoretical consequences for the concept of mie Franc languages. In France, the 1637 establishment of the Acade aise was an important institutional development in making French, and specically the northern, langue doil dialect of French, a consistent and rational national standard.7 By the late eighteenth century, both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in France accepted the natural logic of a national language nationalism and rationalism drawing each others maps. The French Revolution was hardly about the strength of dialects over standard languages, and certainly not about the democratic ` res famous 1794 preservation of minority languages as Bertrand Bare ` res quote about fanaticism speaking Basque makes clear. Indeed, Bare insistence that The language of a free people must be one and the same for all resonates with Habermass ideal speech situation, in which consensus is arrived at through interlocutors consistent use of terms to mean the same things (Habermas 1990: 87). In the intellectual formation of national standard languages in modernizing Europe, a number of questions about clarity, sense, and nonsense surfaced as markers of social and political dierence. In revolutionary France, A fundamental misunderstand , volonte ), the royalists ing of the meaning of certain words (e.g. egalite believed, had shaped the revolutionaries thought processes and distorted their perception of things (De Landa 1997: 231).8 In England, lexicography and philology preceded statistics as a parallel form of anxious compilation of social data beginning in the seventeenth century. Dictionary-making, from Robert Cawdreys Table Alphabeticall (1604) or Thomas Blounts Glossographia (1656), through Samuel Johnsons Dictionary of the English Language (1755),9 to the full ower of the project resulting in the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid- to late1800s, traces an increasing rationalization of meaning as semantic meaning in British intellectual thought a concern no doubt heightened by the linguistic aspects of the 1707 union of England and Scotland and the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, both of which intensied issues of language and dialect. It was not simply the Act of Union, however, but a

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conuence of factors that resulted in this sense of language. The Act of Union with Wales had been in force since 1536, but the problem of linguistic unication for Wales the conuence of British with English didnt become an issue until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century (Tyson 1998). In any event, Johnson wrote in the Preface to his 1755 dictionary:
When I took the rst survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity, and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the surages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority. (Johnson 1967[1755]: 1)

If rationalists considered language to be some form of socialcontractual arrangement between speakers, then dictionaries, grammars, and pronunciation guides put that contract in writing.10 The emerging science of lexicography banished folk-etymologizing from the eld. As Culler (1988) has observed, only true histories of words would matter. The thought, for instance, that there might be any but a coincidental homonymic relationship between the words rage and outrage would mark ones lack of linguistic knowledge.11 As the sense of linguistic meaning became increasingly rational and less sensual, sound evaporated as language was increasingly re-produced in philosophy as a rational mental construct. Locke oered a proto-Saussurean model of language in the Essay on Human Understanding (1690), in which he argued that categorization is not in the world, but in the mind an arrangement of particular instances agreed upon by human beings:
[I]deas are general when they are set up as the representatives of many particular things: but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence . . . When therefore we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into, by the understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars. (Locke III, iii, 11)

Lockes sense of the arbitrariness of signs, however, is more universalist that relativist. For whatever the names of concepts, they are derived from the empirical impress of the world onto the human mind. Any true language would be ultimately commensurable with and translatable into any other, because at root all languages came into existence for the same rea-

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son: to name the world in ways that could be communicated socially. Even abstract concepts are rooted in descriptors of the material world.
It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse signications, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instil, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity, &c., are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking . . . and I doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should nd, in all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their rst rise from sensible ideas. (Locke III, i, 5)

Thus Locke argues that even the most abstract concepts are ultimately derived from things on the ground, the naming of material reality. This sense of language as naming has a long but uneven history in Western philosophy. While the concept of the arbitrariness of the sign can be traced to Platos Cratylus; it is Hermongenes and not Socrates who voices the opinion that there is no principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement. Socrates own analysis is much more deeply rooted in historicized relations of metaphorical extension and sonic iconicity, just those kinds of things that modern philology discarded as folk etymologizing or false linguistic consciousness. In historical linguistics, however which of course means the social history of language in use sound iconicity and metaphorical extension have been crucial. For example, Uli Linke has analyzed the metaphorical extensions out of ProtoIndo-European that resulted in the consanguineal and anal kinship terms in the Indo-European languages (Linke 1985). In other words, the fate of sound iconicity in the history of language and language ideology is important to consider.

The fate of the pun One battleground between the rationalizing and uniformizing fervor of standardization and practices of heterogeity can be seen in a history of the pun. Here we can witness the uneven and non-isomorphic ways in which the rationalizing developments of modernity took hold of language, both in order to stabilize and normativize semantic meaning, and to promote semantic meaning as the keystone of what language is for. It may be less the practice of punning itself and more the shifting attitude

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toward punning and wordplay that marks the emergence of a sense of language for modernity. As a lexical item in English, pun is itself an addition of modernity. Paull F. Baum, in his groundbreaking work on Chaucers puns (1956), notes that the rst recorded instance of the word pun occurred in 1643 (Baum 1956: 226); the edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that I consulted placed the words rst appearance even later, in 1662 (in Act I scene i of John Drydens rst play, The Wild Gallant ). At that time, it was apparently already used with somewhat disparaging overtones:
A bare Clinch will serve the turn; a Carwichet, a Quarterquibble, or a Punn.

The appearance of a term to describe the practice may indicate its availability as a topic for metapragmatic and ideological reection and comment. But punning wordplay surely pre-existed the word pun, as scholarship on Chaucer and other Medieval literary work attests. Sheila Delany has argued that the Late Medieval period in England and the Continent was already distinguished by a growing mistrust of gurative language, a shift away from analogical thought the threads of which are traceable in developments in science, political theory, and poetry (Delany 1990). A number of late medieval authors were bent on pointing out the ctiveness of metaphor and analogy, and to draw a sharp distinction between gures of speech and fact (Justman 1980: 199). Stewart Justman in fact argues that such a distinction is the engine that powers the entire Canterbury Tales a recurring ironic literalism that disruptively organizes the analogical meanings of Chaucers stories. Justman attributes this organizing principal, in part, to a Chaucerian commentary on the anti-authoritarian literalism of the emerging merchant class in fourteenthcentury England an emergence marked, in Chaucers telling, by an inability to recognize the moral authority of analogical signs. One frequently explored instance of this misrecognition is the conation of sexual and economic intercourse in the puns on cosyn and cosynage (relationship and deception) and on taillynge (both account and the modern slang word for pudendum [Silverman 1953: 330]) in the Shipmans Tale (Abraham 1977; Justman 1980; Silverman 1953).12 Appealing to the Communist Manifesto, Justman relates the shifting attitude toward gurative analogy to Marx and Engelss contention that
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand . . . has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors . . . The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation . . . (Marx and Engels; cited in Justman 1980: 201)13

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While this fourteenth-century attack by literalism on guration and analogy, in Justmans view, perhaps marks the early emergence of a nascent bourgeoisie in England, Chaucer clearly depended on gurative language and speech play to make the critical shift manifest. Nor is the fate of punning uniform, unidirectional, or isomorphically linked to economic shifts. Absent the institutions of standardization that arose beginning in the seventeenth century, writers were potentially more open to transformative and productive gaps in linguistic form and structure. As Baum noted:
After the medieval rhetoricians in their confused and mechanical way had played with it, the Renaissance rhetoricians overworked it and the Elizabethans reveled in all of its manifestations. (Baum 1956: 226)

Thus the pleasures of punning rose and fell over the two centuries of developing class structure in Early Modern England. That Shakespeare did not have access to what we would today consider a dictionary is jarring, perhaps. But when Shakespeare died in 1616, Blounts Glossographia was still forty years o, and Johnsons Dictionary a century and a half away. When he used a word, Shakespeare had no centralized, authoritative resource to tell him if he was spelling the word correctly, using it to indicate its accepted meaning, or indicating a pronunciation that was in keeping with accepted practice. For Shakespeare, the success of an utterance was predicated on its phatic potential, rather than any exclusive appeal to a referential sense based on the kinds of authoritative metadiscursive compilations of terms that we today take for granted. As James Weiner has written of the Foi in Papua New Guinea, if no dictionary exists, then it is only by the appropriateness of ones utterance that the tness of a word is judged . . . a matter as much of sensual and aesthetic as of lexical tness (1991: 199). Harris (1996), Urban (1996), and Jacobson (2002) all note the cultural and historical specicity of dictionaries as powerful metalinguistic authorities, and allude to the potential experiential distinctions of practicing lexicography or philology in communities where the dictionary is not the ultimate source of authoritative statements about the meaning of verbal signs.14
The published dictionary delivers what it promises: the printed book is itself a quasi-permanent repository of invariant (sc. written) forms. In an oral culture no parallel enterprise would be possible. And if it were, consulting the oral lexicographer would be a quite dierent communicational undertaking from consulting the dictionary. (Harris 1996: 103)

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The shift from a seventeenth-century Elizabethan concept of punnings place in language to a more modern and rational concept of such has been commented on by a number of literary scholars. In his classic treatise on poetic ambiguity, William Empson wrote of the shifting fortunes of punning as ideologies of proper language shifted in England. Writing of Marvells use of puns, Empson remarked that their distinguishing characteristic is that Marvell manages to feel Elizabethan about them (Empson 1930: 106). But punning, Empson continued, became harder as the language was tidied up (Empson 1930: 106). By tidied up, he alludes to the changing status of punning during the emergence of standardization and normativization beginning in the seventeenth century:
The Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispronunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great renement, of which any number could easily be collected for a irtation or indignant harangue. By the time English had become anxious to be correct the great thing about a pun was that it was not a Bad Pun, that it satised the Unities and what not; it could stand alone and would expect admiration, and was a much more elegant aair. (Empson 1930: 106)

The anxiety about correctness of which Empson writes is reected in the growing concern with rationalized treatments of language that attempted to contain the heterogeneity of linguistic practice. As English was codied, the potentialities of phonetic iconicities became thought of, in some circles, as transgressive. This is not to say that modernity made the sensuousness of poetic language unacceptable. It was a question of decorum. By the time of the Augustan poets in the early eighteenth century, poets were berating punsters for displaying their bad taste in public:
Dryden . . . jibbed at a pun by Horace: Certain it is, he has no ne palate who can feed so heartily on garbage. John Dennis asserted that every Equivocal is but ambiguous Falsehood, and, against the defence that puns are diverting, responded by asking whether those who fart in company might use the same foolish argument to exonerate themselves. (Redfern 1984: 51)

Daniel Defoe (16601731), author of Robinson Crusoe, and thus someone who may be thought of as having considered the problems of human communication and language, proposed in 1697 that a 36-member Academy should monitor the stability of English. Defoe delighted in the fact that under the authority of such an Academy it would be as criminal then to coin words as money (Nist 1966: 275). This Early Modern English analogy between proper linguistic and economic relations resonates with a point that Saussure made more subtly in his idea of linguistic

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valeur. The analogy also echoes Dantes belief, expressed in the Inferno, that because social order depends on symbols . . . counterfeiting coins is a worse crime than murder. It is more far-reaching (Justman 1980: 204).15 Concern with punning and the true meanings of words were not limited ` re wrote: Its all plays on words, pure aecto Britain. In France, Molie tation, and this is in no way how Nature speaks (cited in Redfern 1984: 51).16 As standard linguistic forms and practices became stabilized through the policing practices of modernity and as semantic meaning became the measure of an utterance and its interpretation punning became increasingly transgressive. The call of the phoneme, whose echoes tell of wild realms beyond the code (Culler 1988: 3) could only be heeded with increasing circumspection. Indeed Empson himself favored circumspection. By foregrounding their semantic possibilities too starkly, he advised, punsters threaten to use it as a showpiece to which poetry and relevance may be sacriced (Empson 1930: 103). That Empson regarded Shakespeares puns as eeminate and wished that the Bard had been more manly in his literary habits (Empson 1930: 110111) and that Maurice Charney referred (approvingly, I should emphasize) to the quarter-rhymes of Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker as miscegenated (Charney 1978: 24) gives some sense of the metaphorical ground of race and gender that I tread when I say that the problem of language and modernity is bound to the problems of nation, identity, homogeneity, and marginalization. By the turn of the twentieth century, then, the sensuousness of language was acceptable in controlled doses so long as it enhanced or at least did not detract from meaning or, in Empsons term, relevance. As Empson discussed in his exploration of ambiguity, Victorian poetics was concerned with rescuing unied meaning from a potential sea of signication, an anxious desire to x the leakiness of languages and grammars by calling in the most masterful of master plumbers.17 A dierent interpretation was that of Owen Bareld, who argued that poetry was modernitys only access to more primitive and authentic ways of experiencing vy-Bruhls notion of participation mystique, the world. Drawing on Le Bareld found in the sensuousness of poetry a means of accessing a different way of being in the world.
. . . one of the most ecient causes of pleasure is palpably sound; the rhythm, the music, and the manner in which rhythm and music are wedded to sense. (Bareld 1973[1928]: 47)

But sound and sense here, while wedded, are not on equal terms. On closer examination, it seems clear that sense is the dominant spouse in

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this marriage; rhythm and music are in the service of sense. Barelds sense of the poetic was tied to his theory that everyday language is a collection of dead metaphors. The creativity of the poet can revivify a more sensuous experience of language by reinstating participation mystique for modern listeners. But Bareld never quite pushed past the idea that modern use in language was a sense-making process consisting of words and meanings. In Barelds poetic diction, sound is wedded to sense, but never in such a way as to actually interfere with it.18 Barelds theory of language is deaf to doowop. In the face of these emerging norms of linguistic practice, marginalized groups have made much of the space where meaning and sound meet. For example, in eighteenth-century England, the emerging class of commercial Grub Street writers derided by Pope and Swift as hacks often called on non-lexical rhythmic repetition, repeated words suggesting the sounds of musical instruments, instrumental sounds suggesting words, and the like. Their poems were excoriated by the sophisticates of the day Pope referred to their works as Duncean literature, meaning literature for dunces. Lance Bertelsen (1992) has tellingly referred to the vocable eects of the Grub Street hacks as the doowop eect of their poetry.

Vocables In the context of the rationalizing forces of modernizing Europe in which utterances or parts of utterances that threatened clarity and transparency were increasingly excised from language, in which language was reduced to the semantic loads carried by lexically and syntactially decodable utterances nonsense had no place. Vocables had nowhere to go. Jane Goodman (1998, 2000), for example, describes a number of rationalizations that the texts of New Berber Songs in Algeria have undergone as they moved from the village to the international world music scene. Among these has been the striking of vocables from the texts: nonsense syllables were eliminated the singers considered such syllables u that wastes space and interferes with the real point .19 Powers (1992) has theorized that in their transcriptions of Native American song texts, early ethnomusicologists translated vocables into Anglicized poetic exclamations such as O! and Lo!20 One theory about the ceremonial use of vocables in traditional or pre-colonial contexts draws a connection between vocables and secret languages (Briggs 1996; Powers 1986). In that context, vocables are associated with powerful discourse: meaningless to the human or non-

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human beings who do not understand them, but allowing powerful performers to communicate with the supernatural world. That is, someone (or something) can understand it. The coding aspect of vocables is also invoked in the theory that vocables in popular music are acting euphemistically, standing in for more direct references to sexual intercourse. This theory explains but a small proportion of doowop vocable practices. Both these theories redeem vocables from nonsense by proposing alternate contexts in which their semanticity would emerge. But unless one is prepared to make extended arguments about survivals of traditional ceremonial forms, the rst theory does not address the deliberate use of nonsense in non-ceremonial contemporary popular forms. The second idea has the virtue of posing a question about the politics of the relationship between the marginalization of vocables and the fact that the poetic practices of marginalized people often so prominently feature vocables. For by the turn of the twentieth century, this standardizing, modern ideology of language as the clear communication of ideas from one brain to another had turned the common Proto-Indo-European etymologies of baby, babble, and barbarian into a bad pun. Doowop as bad literature And so let me now turn to the Duncean literature of our day rock n roll. In their almost studied banality, early rock n roll lyrics transgressed the ideology of meaningful, communicative language. The problems of the rationalist set toward language resound in the problem of the doowop song text. Most complaints about rock n roll during the 1950s were about the music the simple and repetitive syntax of the chord progressions, the primitiveness of the jungle beat of the drums. But lyrics, too, came under scrutiny. Meredith Willson, the composer of the Broadway shows The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was quoted in The Instrumentalist in 1958 as saying:
My complaint is that it just isnt music. Its utter garbage, and it should not be confused in any way with anything related with music or verse. (Anonymous 1958: 92; emphasis added)

Similarly, Janice Hume Russell, a music teacher and parent, wrote in the March 1958 issue of the Music Journal about her concerns for her young daughter, who might become overly inuenced by what she was watching on American Bandstand after school. Russell solved the potential problem by giving her daughter a copy of the soundtrack to Oklahoma for Christmas. This gambit succeeded, as Russell wrote:

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For, as soon as she had really listened to the record once through, she decided the tunes of Oklahoma had a lilt and melody she hadnt expected and, best of all, some story value. (Russell 1958: 84; emphasis added)

Verse and story value here both appear to be about the selfconscious cleverness of Broadway show lyrics, in distinction to the nonsense and banality of rock n roll. Within the public sphere of popular performers, as well, distinctions were made distinctions of mainstream and margin, in both race and class, wrapped up in a commentary about taste and sense in linguistic or lyrical material. Pat Boone, speaking of his early hits covering Little Richard songs, has commented on his initial reluctance to record rock n roll songs because of their texts:
I didnt want to record songs like Tutti Frutti and other songs like that, that dont make a lot of sense. (Montgomery and Page 1984)

And indeed, in watching kinescopes of Pat Boones rock n roll performances from the 1950s, the most striking thing isnt necessarily the stiness with which he delivers awop bobalubop alop bam boom. Rather, it may be the desperation with which Boone holds onto the semanticity of I got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do, as if these meaningful words were in fact the material of the song.21 During the 1950s, Steve Allen was famously aghast at rock n roll lyrics. The host of the Tonight Show, he would derisively read the words of songs like Be Bop A Lula on the air with a mock seriousness, as though they were real poetry. In 1965, Tom Wolfe wrote of Phil Spector having to bear with a similarly disdainful performance during his appearance as a guest on the David Susskind show in New York:
And Susskind sits there on his show reading one of Spectors songs out loud no music, just reading the words, from the Top 60 or whatever it is Fine Fine Boy, to show how banal rock & roll is. The song just keeps repeating, Hes a ne ne boy. So Spector starts drumming on the big coee-table there with the at of his hands in time to Susskinds voice and says, What youre missing is the beat. Blam blam. (Wolfe 1992[1965]: 63)

That the Steve Allens, Meredith Willsons, David Susskinds, William B. Williamses, and Janice Hume Russells of the world thought it important to critique, if not belittle, not only the musical but the lexical materials of rock n roll tells us of rock n rolls particular kind of nonsense, which disrupted and undermined the way in which poetic devices were supposed to work that is, the way poetry was supposed to wed sound and sense in order to enhance meaning.

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This default theory of the role of poetry has been largely accepted in the celebratory mainstream history of rock music as well. Generally, the history of rock states that lyrics were in a sense disposable until Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar and showed rock n roll songwriters how to compose meaningful texts. Those who dismiss doowop often do so along the lines that the texts are childish and primitive. Those who celebrate doowop often do so by imagining a context virtuosity, sociability, feeling that allows the illocutionary force of a doowop utterance to be conated with its meaning: The words dont matter anyway, its about the voices. Both of these arguments play into the default history of rock songwriting by reproducing the role of sensible lyrics in the development of a political and poetic art form crediting the lexied poetry and political position of lyrics, but rejecting the unlexied poetry and political position of doowop.22 Both also play into a sense of language that is cognitive, in the head, divorced from performance in the voice.

Theorizing doowop At the same time, I must admit that doowop vocables are rarely considered political statements. They are usually contextualized as iconic replacements for band instruments. One positivist theory about doowops origins, held by many performers as well as critics and historians, holds that vocal harmony grew out of economic lack a lack of instruments on the urban street corners where the style developed. Johnny Keyes, a member of the Magnicents from Chicago, wrote the following:
Making music was very basic. The one who knew the words to the song was the lead singer. The remaining three or four singers imitated the sounds that the horns made in the background, in harmony. (Quoted in Pruter 1996: 2)

This take on doowop vocables as iconic stand-ins for horn sections explains some but not all of the vocal practices of doowop. To be sure, a song like the Orioles Crying in the Chapel does stand as an archetype of the default theory about vocal harmony. The lead singer (the amazing Sonny Til) sings the song while the group with him lays down a comfortable bass/baritone ground for the melody to lie in, and the rst tenor weaves soft falsetto obbligato phrases around the still points of the arrangement. Unlike a number of other group-singing traditions, in which the line of a text is shared among various members of the ensemble, the lexical text of Crying in the Chapel is not distributed among the group members. Sonny Til sings all the words while the other singers vocalize

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on high-back /u/. There is one exception to this arrangement: In the second bridge (known as a channel in the lexicon of the genre), the background voices sing the line youll search and youll search but youll never nd. Otherwise, there is no verbalization in the harmony that is, no distinct indexing of the dierence between voices and fabricated instruments, such as the ability of voices to change the concentrations of overtones in the formation of dierent vowel sounds (see Feld, Fox, Porcello, and Samuels 2004; Ladefoged 2000). Since their texted lines are accompanied by a shift from rst person to second person, one can say that the background vocalists never take up any portion of Sonny Tils rst-person narrative.23 Crying in the Chapel then is, as Johnny Keyes wrote, an example of a lead singer and The remaining three or four singers imitat[ing] the sounds that the horns made in the background. But this theory that vocables are, in any simple way, replacing instruments doesnt account for the range of practices in doowop vocalization the ights of virtuosity in doowop, the seamless shifting between lexical and nonlexical vocalizations, the almost baroque lengths to which arrangements were sometimes taken in the service of semantically empty vocable material. Doowop breaches the boundaries between meaningful and meaningless sounds. The importance of vocables in the genre can be witnessed in the titles of songs, which often forego words (and which are, of course, heavily inuenced by onomatopoeia): Sh-Boom, BuzzBuzz-Buzz, Mope-Itty-Mope, Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-Ko-Bop, Rama Lama Ding Dong, Ling, Ting, Tong, Chop Chop Boom, Ka-Ding Dong, Rang Tang Ding Dong, Bim Bam Boom, Zoop, Wiggie Waggie Woo, Ding Ding Dong, or Zoom Zoom Zoom not to mention the countless songs about chapel bells ringing that give license to iconic vocalizing. Clearly all this nonsense bears illocutionary force and is thereby interpretable. But we should not confuse interpretability with meaning, which is, in a straightforward lexico-semantic sense, absent. At some point, we have to deal with the practice of meaninglessness. Vocables here employ phonotactics to do battle at the boundaries of language in its guise as a semantico-referential system. They eervesce and overow their rightful place as background style. In part, perhaps, through their associations with more primitive or iconic modes of communication, they overwhelm the poetics of modernity with meaninglessness and perversity. The genre abounds with examples. Groups like the Five Discs pushed doowops vocable virtuosity to the hilt. Never Let You Go, for example, opens with an extended non-texted section, featuring the kind of soaring falsetto that was often reserved for the ends of songs. The introduction features star turns by bass Charlie diBella and lead singer John Carbone. When the meaningful words do nally appear, they are blended

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into the background, as the vocable display continues. In Rubber Biscuit, the Chips push this even further, creating almost an entire song out of vocables, interspersed with spoken breaks that are only marginally more sensible (today I had a cool-water sandwich and a Sunday-go-tomeeting bun). The Channels named for the middle break of a doowop song were another group that pushed the semantic emptiness of vocables distinctly into the foreground. On songs such as Stars in the Sky, as the group intoned the lyrics of the song, lead singer Earl Lewis performed virtuosic falsetto runs in a style and with a microphone balance that interfered heavily with the decodability of the lexical text. And, in Vito and Salutations version of Unchained Melody, a number of performance practices interfere with the clarity of the declaimed text.24 First, the group takes this famous ballad and performs it about two and a half times faster than the original (approximately 150 beats per minute). Second, the lead singer, Vito Balsamo, performs the song in a falsetto high enough to aect as does a coloratura soprano the relationship between the fundamental frequency of a note and the harmonic formants that make the decoding of vowel qualities possible. Finally, the arrangement of the song slips the bonds between lexical and non-lexical material, using syllabic repetition for artistic and rhythmic eect:
Oh, my love, my darling, I hunger for your tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-touch, oooooo Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-mu-much, are you

What, exactly, is the status of language as a meaning-bearing system of reference here? In versions of Tin Pan Alley standards, such as the Salutations rendition of Unchained Melody, the Marcels version of Blue Moon, or the Impacts version of Canadian Sunset, the lyrical texts of these songs sometimes are cast in a role something like what Tom McArthur (1998) calls Decorative English. In a sense, they become slightly more meaningful vocables. When we say things about early rock n roll such as the words dont matter, I think we often gloss over just how horrifying a statement that is for a modern, rationalist perspective on language and poetry. Doowop makes a dierent claim on such poetic devices as alliteration, metrical stress, assonance, and consonance. Sound is not meanings dutiful spouse, but rather its jealous sibling. This danger of meaninglessness overpowering meaningfulness is, I think, what Steve Allen and Meredith Willson and countless others were responding to in these songs. Vocables threatened to overrun meaning with noise. One way of recontaining the transgressiveness of virtuosic doowopping has been to infantilize it, making it analogous to the babble of babies (i.e.,

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not barbarians). A second has been to frame it as novelty. In practice, these methods are often combined. Rhino Records sells a CD called DooWop For Kids: Rubber Biscuits And Rama Lama Ding Dongs. The promotional blurb for the recording reads:
Grown-ups love 50s doo-wop and now kids can too with this lighthearted collection of the genres silliest hits. Also includes liner notes by Dr. Demento! (http:/ /www.Rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=7558)

Theyre silly. In fact, Dr. Dementos liner notes say that Doowop must be the silliest music ever invented. One reason we know that theyre silly is because we know that song lyrics are supposed to be meaningful.25 And we know that meaningful in this context means poetic devices wedded to sense. And we know this because we have naturalized an emergent ideology of bourgeois modernity about how language works, what language is for, and how language relates to other cultural domains, including for instance music and understanding.

The Apache dog story Let me end this exploration with a nal sonic but non-musical example. It is a story told by Drew Lacapa at a public gathering on the San Carlos Apache reservation in 1995. Lacapa is a monolingual English speaker, but this does not keep him from critiquing the ideology that speaking a single language will somehow result in meaningful communication.26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 lo:::ng time ago. actually not too long ago last week. there was these Indian dogs. they were running across the side of the road. rea:::lly whackin at the cars tires. ri ri ri ri ri ri ri ri ri you know how the kids dogs do they run out and bite the tires? car drives o vhuuuuu people who own white white peoples dogs were on the other side. car drives up. dogs go

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bowwow bowwow, bowwow bowwow dont e:::::ven grab the tires stay right on the sidewalk get on the grass. dont even get on the road. bowwow, bowwow wuuuuuu car drives o. pretty soon the white dogs looked at those Indian peoples dogs and said Hey! dont get up on the tire thats DANgerous. stay on the side of the road be ORganized. dont say ri ri ri ri ri gaa, wild Indian DOGS? be ORganized! say bowwow, bowWOW ! a::::ll look at each other like, whos this guy tellin us what to do white peoples dogs. you know? scratchin their mange? pretty soon another car comes by. big pickup truck. a::::ll those Indian dogs start running wild. didnt get on the road ? stayed, on the sidewalk? a:ll of, em start saying bowwow, bowwow! bowwow, bowwow! bowwow, bowwow! a:::::ll ways and the car took o huuuuuu pretty soon they all turned to one another looked at each other and said , bow wow. e::: came to be. and thats how the word e:

There are many things I could discuss about this performance the way in which it satirizes traditional myths, with its calquing of Apache ida a long time ago); the etiological ending narrative openings (doo an

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that seals the eect of the satirization; the multiplicity of vocal styles that Drew Lacapa employs in performing his canine characters. But at the moment I simply want to attend to the idea that the white dogs tell the Apache dogs how to be civilized by telling them what to say. In order to be organized, in part, you should stop saying riririririri and instead say bowwow. This distinction between varieties of nonsense brings the problem of meaningful communication to consciousness. I should say that in good ethnographic fashion I decided that in order to understand this joke I needed to understand the meaning of the interjection in the last two lines of the joke. I spoke with a number of consultants about it, collecting . A few months later, someone pointed various glosses of the interjection e out to me, when I asked him about it, that the joke wasnt about meaning; it was about barking. He said, You know how white people are. Its like theyre the only ones who know how to talk. A white person will always tell you what youre doing wrong, even if its just doing nothing, you know? So in that, its like even our barking is better than your barking you know, even though its just dogs barking. Some peoples nonsense is more meaningful than other peoples.

Conclusion What is doowop, anyway? Maybe it is just stupidity, a bunch of hoodlums on a street corner singing diiip dip didip, didip, didip, didip, daa. I have attempted to argue here that it perhaps makes sense to defend stupidity in the age of modernity; perhaps stupidity carries indexical criticism of mainstream coherence in its wake, willful dismantling of the gagrule amenities which normally pass for coherence, as Nathaniel Mackey writes of scat singing (quoted in Edwards 2002). I am not claiming that languages ability to refer and to mean is unimportant. I am claiming that modernitys ideological means of powerfully naturalizing semantic content as the overwhelmingly central denition of language is, perhaps, historically unique. While the referential power of language has always, in some sense, been at the core of its philosophical import, the importance of transparency of transmission was uniquely highlighted beginning in the seventeenth century, when contact with hundreds of unique languages in the colonial encounter posed interactional and communicative challenges, and brought questions of intelligibility and unintelligibility of phonetic and syntactic material to the center of European thought about the world. In this environment which included not only the ascendancy of vernacular dialects and national languages over the former dominance of Latin, but also the de-

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ployment of numerous trade jargons and pidgins in interactions between Europeans and the world, not to mention the development of Creole languages in various European colonial contexts (Bakker 1997; Chaudenson 2001; Hymes 1971; Romaine 1988) it is perhaps inevitable that colonizing powers might discover the idea that language is created in situations where people have a need to communicate clearly with one another. But this ideology is historically situated, as is the development of the lexicon that accompanies it. While the English verb to mean in both its sense of purpose or intent (as in what do you mean to do about it?) and in its sense of verbal signication (as in what does hypochondriac mean?) dates in the OED to the ninth century, it was with the rise of modernity that the word began to be used more expansively. The rst documented written appearance of its nominal form meaning occurred in the fourteenth century, with derivations of that form (meaningful, meaningless), appearing even more recently. We can see the continuation of this lexico-semantic emphasis resonating in a number of contemporary cultural practices and ideologies: the current American notion that democracy would work better if we all talked the same way; that questions about language are best framed as the problem of guaranteeing unfettered transference of thoughts from brain to brain; that dening your terms is the best way to guarantee a felicitous debate; that all languages are equal because they can all refer to the world equally well; that language revitalization programs should take the form of vocabulary lessons. In a nutshell, the problem of modernity is the problem of meaning. It isnt necessarily that this meaning wins out, or this other meaning wins out. Its that meaning wins out over ambiguity, over nonsense, over poetry by holding out the hope that somehow, somewhere, pure transparent communication should be possible. This hope exists on a continuum, with sense/ language/ logic at one end and nonsense/music/ art gravitating toward the other. The ideal end of the spectrum in which language takes on the guise of mathematics was the dream of the logical positivists. Part of Wittgensteins break with that modernist sense of language for philosophy lay in his ability to imagine nonsense. Arguing that Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think, Wittgenstein pulled apart the logical bonds that had held language and the world together.27 Wittgenstein argued that the logic of imagining was not like the logic of language, for Word language allows of senseless combinations of words, but the language of imagining does not allow us to imagine anything senseless. Driving home the distinction, Wittgenstein continued, It would be possible to imagine people who had something not quite unlike a language: a play of sounds,

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without vocabulary or grammar. The example Wittgenstein parenthetically appended to his observation was Speaking with tongues, but he certainly could have been describing doowop as well. For a seventeenth-century modern like Locke, conversely, language was a map of the meaningful entities existing in the world, and so the logic of language and the logic of imagining were closely aligned. In a telling passage in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the chapter titled Of the Abuse of Words Locke wrote: He that hath Names without Ideas, wants Meaning in his Words (III, x, 33). Of course, in the struggle between meaning and nonsense, meaning wins a lot, and from our perspective its hard to see how it could be any other way. To say that meaninglessness should win is like saying that maybe things could fall up when we let go of them. But even if it falls down instead of up, Id like to suggest that we let go of our own fetishization of meaning as the key to language and culture. This anthropological truism codied in the normal science of the discipline through textbook titles like Man Makes Sense (Hammel and Simmons 1970) is hard to kill. And Im not suggesting that we kill it. But I do want to suggest that it may blind us to some very important linguistic and semiotic practices in numerous communities impacted by modernitys onslaught of standard dialects, national languages, and communicative codication practices that pose ideological challenges to the notion that making sense is the basis for language.28 Our challenge is to understand what theyre saying even though and perhaps because it doesnt make sense.

Notes
* Acknowledgements: This paper was originally presented in November 2000, as part of the session Linguistic Modernity and its Discontents: Mixed Evidence, Hybrid Models, at the 99th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California. My thanks to James Wilce for asking me to participate; to the other panel participants, Jane Goodman, Margaret Bender, and Janina Fenigsen; and to our discussants, Asif Agha and John McCreery. Thanks also to Jackie Urla, Bob Paynter, Calla Jacobson, Donal Carbaugh, Benjamin Bailey, Stephen Olbrys, Steven Feld, and Norma Mendoza-Denton, whose critiques and encouragement in response to earlier versions of this essay were crucial to its development. As ever, all errors and omissions remain my responsibility. 1. My choice of doowop is deliberate, as my sense is that there is a relationship between the transgressive and disparaged linguistic practices of the genre and the race-based and class-based maginalized social status of its most prominent performers. 2. Like many modern terms in social science, modernity has been a dicult concept to pin down. A list of the concepts, events, and phenomena brought under this term

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

range from the Enlightenment and the rise of the scientic method to the discovery of single-point perspective or Leonardos anatomical studies, from the industrial revolution to the rise of mass media, from the advent of ethnic nationalism, the birth of sociology, the discovery of the folk and the foundations of folkloristics in the aftermath of urbanization, the beginnings of colonialism, the reformation, the counterreformation, globalization all have been suggested as possible beginnings for what is subsumed under the modern. Bruno Latour (1993), of course, suggests that none of this matters. It is not my purpose here to pin down the term. For the purposes of this article for I can imagine others in which the decision would be dierent I take modernity in something like Anthony Giddenss (1991) sense: modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their inuence (1991: 1). The advent of the kinds of institutional and intersubjective shifts that Giddens writes about also coincide with a suite of changes in the way philosophers and other critical writers seem to have thought about language. My view here is also congruent with approaches to modernity growing out of Weberian perspectives on the forces of rationalization in post-Enlightenment European society, both in the realm of politics and philosophy. Included in this practice in doowop are Chinese (The Five Keys Ling Ting Tong, Gladys Knight and the Pips Ching Chong), Japanese (Rang Tang Ding Dong), African primitives (Little Anthony and the Imperials Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop), and Martian (the Boss-Tones Mope-ity Mope), to name a few. In fact, Dead Dog Records, a doowop reissue label, has collected 31 examples of these Orientalist performances on a CD titled My Chinese Girl. The practice is certainly not limited to doowop. Writing of scat singing in jazz, Brent Hayes Edwards observes, from the very beginnings of scat . . . the form was concerned with the representation of the foreign (2002: 627). This practice extends into some of the vocable gures of hip-hop as well. Hear, for example, Redmans Blow Your Mind (Remix) on Whut? Thee Album, or Slick Ricks Indian Girl on The Great Adventures of Slick Rick (Ra Crockett, personal communication). All of this is made more complicated by the fact that doowop performers notably urban African-Americans and Italian-Americans likely spoke non-dominant, nonstandard, marginalized dialects of English. But see Kochman (1983) and Reisman (1970) on the role of strategic ambiguity in marginalized performances of dominant languages. The use of the English term policing has proven dicult. As Gordon writes, . . . Polizeiwissenschaft, or science of police (although the English word policy is arguably a better equivalent to this meaning of Polizei ) (Gordon 1991: 10). Poetics is implicated in this statistical coincidence as well. As Lavery discusses, Whorf and Wallace Stevens toiled for the same Hartford insurance company at the same time. One could easily use the ascendancy of Castilian in Spain, Tuscan in Italy, or RP in England as Francien in France in such a discussion. An analogous notion that clarity and sensible meaning will result from the rule of decontextualized univocality can be found in a phonological element of the present day argument against Ebonics: the claim that because /aks/ in English is a semantically distinct word from /ask/, its use as an interrogative marker in AAVE therefore somehow opens potential for confusion between speakers. The dominance of Johnsons work was such that for more than a century it was referred to simply as the Dictionary (Nist 1976: 278). For a discussion of contractualism, see Harris 1996.

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11. By etymological reckoning, rage is a radical element, a free-standing noun, whereas outrage, far from being a special form of rage, is rather the combination of the Latinderived ultra- prex, and a sux that, when attached to a word such as bag-, is pronounced with a neutral schwa (Culler 1988: 3). 12. Abraham reads the cosyn/cosynage pun as a performative, arguing that the pun does what it represents. That is, the pun on relation and deception is itself a model of what a pun is: a relationship between words that is, at the same time, a deception. 13. Another interpretation of the modern bourgeois family is that it ceased to be an economic institution and became a space of personal intimacy (J. Wilce, personal communication). 14. In fact, when Chaucer used the ME words glose and glosynge, they carried a double meaning: both interpretation and attery. See e.g. the Summoners Tale lines 128 129, and the Wife of Baths Prologue, line 514. 15. Justman continues: As opposed to Dante, Chaucer is fascinated with counterfeiting with false relics, bogus alchemy, counterfeit keys, unauthentic statements, literary falsications, false fronts of all kinds (1980: 204). 16. I have altered the translation in Redferns text. Ce nest que jeux de mots, quaectation pure, Et ce nest point ainsi que parle la nature. 17. Empson himself described the inevitability of an acknowledgement of ambiguity in the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, he observes, move ambiguity into footnotes that describe all the potential meanings of a Shakespearean usage, but which insist that one of those meanings is the correct one. Thus I believe the nineteenth-century editor secretly believed in a great many of his alternatives at once . . . The eighteenth-century editor had none of this . . . his object was to unmix the metaphors as quickly as possible, and generally restore the text to a rational and shipshape condition (Empson 1930: 82). Empson mentions as in recent atomic physics as justication for the shift toward indeterminacy of the linguistic object; and Jonathan Bate (1998) credits Empsons prior training in mathematics and his exposure to Einsteins writings on relativity for the literary theorists quantum Shakespeare understanding of poetic indeterminacy. 18. Lest we forget, Poetic Diction is subtitled A Study in Meaning. 19. Along similar lines, Joel Kuipers (1998) has discussed a modernizing shift in naming practices among the Subamun in Indonesia, involving the bleaching of the extrasemantic qualities of personal names. That is, names were no longer meant to evoke a network of social relations, but rather were used to simply index the individual named. 20. For instance, Spinden (1933) quotes the following lines from Horatio Hales 1883 Iroquois Book of Rites: Woe! Woe! Hearken ye! We are diminished! Woe! Woe! The cleared land has become a thicket Woe! Woe! (Hale 1883[1969], quoted in Spinden 1933: 52) 21. Boone has also received lots of self-deprecating I didnt understand rock n roll storytelling mileage out of his supposed misguided desire to change the words Aint That a Shame (from the Fats Domino song) to Isnt That a Shame, because aint was incorrect English. 22. I do not deny the importance of political consciousness here the distinction between political and politicized, for instance.

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23. This shift makes the addressee of the utterance problematic. In the rst occurrence of the line, it is easy enough to imagine that the lead singer is addressing the audience as you. In the second refrain, however, it is unclear whether the background vocalists are addressing the audience or the lead singer himself. 24. I can only note briey here the interesting fact that doowop passed between two marginalized groups during the 1950s and 1960s the African-American and ItalianAmerican communities of major urban centers. 25. The triumph of this ideology can be seen in the publication of anthologies of rock song lyrics for reading as poetry, absent the beat (Goldstein 1969; Pichaske 1981). Whether this would be Steve Allens or Phil Spectors nightmare-come-true is anyones guess. 26. A note on the transcription: Italic script indicates stress. Lengthening of vowels is indicated by colons following. 27. Benjamin Lee Whorf also unstitched these bonds, arguing not for nonsense, but for relativist logics based in linguistic experience. 28. In an odd coincidence, 1957, the year that Rang Tang Ding Dong was released, was also the year that Chomskys Syntactic Structures was published. While the logician Chomsky surely does not endorse illogic, his fascination with ambiguous sentences (John was frightened by the new methods) is an important feature of his challenge to long-standing notions about the semantic basis of language in the Western intellectual tradition.

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Montgomery, Patrick and Page, Pamela (1984). Rock and Roll, the Early Days. Burbank: Columbia Pictures Home Video/Archive Film Productions. Nist, John (1976). A Structural History of English. New York: St. Martins Press. Pichaske, David R. (1981). The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years. Peoria: The Ellis Press. Powers, William K. (1986). Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (1992). Translating the untranslatable: The place of the vocable in Lakota song. In On the Translation of Native American Literatures, Brian Swann (ed.), 293310. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pruter, Robert (1996). Doowop: The Chicago Scene. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Redfern, Walter (1984). Puns. London: Blackwell. Reisman, Karl (1970). Cultural and linguistic ambiguity in a West Indian village. In AfroAmerican Anthropology, Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and John Szwed (eds.). New York: The Free Press. Romaine, Suzanne (1988). Pidgin and Creole Languages. New York: Longman. Russell, Janice Hume (1958). Antidote to rock n roll. Music Journal (March): 84. Schieelin, Bambi B.; Woolard, Kathryn A.; and Kroskrity, Paul V. (eds.) (1998). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, Albert (1953). Sex and money in Chaucers Shipmans Tale. Philological Quarterly 32: 329336. Smith, Anthony D. (1998). Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Spinden, Herbert Joseph (1933). Songs of the Tewa, Preceded by an Essay on American Indian Poetry. New York: The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Inc. Wolfe, Tom [1992(1965)]. The rst tycoon of teen. In The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing, Clinton Heglin (ed.), 5769. New York: Viking Press. David Samuels (b. 1959) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst <samuels@anthro.umass.edu>. His principal research interests are linguistic anthropology, poetics, language and music, contemporary identity, and Native American culture. His recent publications include The whole and the sum of the parts, or, how Cookie and the Cupcakes told the story of Apache history in San Carlos (1999); Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goodes Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation (2001); and Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (forthcoming).