Yakety Yak

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Yakety Yak was written, produced and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958, spending seven weeks as number one on List of number one rhythm and blues hits and the Hot 100 number one pop list. This song was one of a string of single released by The Coasters between 1957 and 1959 that dominated the charts, one of the biggest performing acts of the rock and roll era.^[1]

[edit] Song

The song is a "playlet", a word Stoller used for the glimpses into teenage life that characterized the songs Lieber and Stoller wrote and produced.^[2] The lyrics describe the listing of household chores to a kid, presumably a teenager, the teenage's response (yakety yak) and the parent's retort (don't talk back), an experience very familiar to a white teenager of the day. Leiber has said the Coasters’ portrayed “a white kid’s view of a black person’s conception of white society.”^[1]

The serio-comic street-smart “playlets” etched out by the songwriters were sung by the Cloasters with sly clowning humor. The yakety saxophone of King Curtis filling in hot, honking bursts in the uptempo doo-woop style. The group was openly theatrical in style -- they were not pretending to be expressing their own experience.^[3]

The threaten punishment for not taking out the garbage and sweeping the floor in the song's humorous lyrics:^[4]

You ain't gonna rock and roll no more,

And the refrain:

Yakety yak, Don't talk back.

Beneath the humor the songs often made incisive points about American culture, largely by lampooning racial stereotypes.^[3]

[edit] Notes

^ ^a ^b The Coasters. Rock Hall of Fame. Retrieved on 2006-11-08.
^ Anthony DeCurtis, & James Henke (eds) (1980). The RollingStone: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music, (3rd Ed.), New York, N.Y.: Random House, Inc., p. 98. ISBN 0-679-73728-6.
^ ^a ^b Matos, Michaelangelo (April 13 2005). Yakety Yak. Seattle Weekly. Retrieved on 2006-11-08.
^ Friedlander, Paul (1996). Rock and Roll: A social history. Boulder, CO: Westview Press (Harper Collins), p. 66. ISBN 0-8133-2725-3.