There was a vast vocabulary of kicking ass. Poor people could be broke-ass, or, in Mississippi, “so broke they didn’t have eye-water to cry with.” Old people were closer to the grave when they were old-ass. The word was also used as an intensifying suffix. The word ‘ass’ was often used as a synonym for ‘self ’, as in, “Get your ass out of here,” or, “I’m taking my ass home.” Going fast was “hauling ass”, going slow was “dragging ass”, and working hard was “busting ass”. People down South got so hungry that they could eat the ass out of a rag doll, or the south end of a northbound mule.Īmericans seemed obsessed by rear ends. If she was “squirrely eyed”, she could stand in the middle of Wednesday and look at both weekends. If she had buck teeth, she could eat corn-on-the-cob through a chainlink fence. If a woman had a talent for oral sex, she could suck a golf ball through 30 feet of garden hose. In America, a rich strain of humour flowed in the opposite direction: colourful exaggeration, swaggering rhetoric, blowing things up to outrageous proportions. In London, comedy was founded on irony, sarcasm, self-deprecation, cutting people down to size, and a fine appreciation for absurdity and silliness. I soon found out that the humour was completely different. In my mid-20s I gave up on England – the class system, the nanny state, the gloom – and started travelling around America. She declared: “I’m gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he runs.” Bessie Smith, betrayed by a cheating man and toting her razor and gun, went up to Black Mountain, where the babies cry for liquor and people use gunpowder just to sweeten their tea. Muddy Waters was drinking TNT and smoking dynamite, hoping some schoolboy would start a fight. Bo Diddley walked 47 miles of barbed wire and used a cobra snake for a necktie. James Brown was a sex machine who could jump back and kiss himself. Bragging would crop up regularly on this musical journey. While I was supposed to be studying history at University College London, I was spending most of my time getting high and immersing myself in African-American music, working my way back through hip-hop, funk, soul and jazz, to the blues. Roxanne Shanté was the brassiest female rapper of the era – “I’m conceited, never beated, never heard of defeated – and Kool G Rap could destroy all-comers: “You can’t replace me, ice me or ace me/ Bass me, face me, slice me or race me/ Bite me or taste me/ I’ll show you I got force./ My rap burns your mouth like hot sauce./ Run for water while I break your tape recorder/ Server to sucker: the order is manslaughter.” Rakim was the first master of the clever lyrical brag (“My intellect wrecks and disconnects your cerebral cortex…”). (“Well, my name is known all over the world/ By all the foxy ladies and the pretty girls …”) As teenagers, we were particularly amused by Big Bank Hank’s brag about wooing Lois Lane away from Superman: “He can’t satisfy you with his little worm/ But I can bust you out with my super sperm.”Īs hip-hop progressed out of its good-time beginnings, the boasting became more skillful and inventive, the verbal flows more dexterous. ![]() Half of my schoolmates knew all the lyrics to ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang (1979), and it was fun to violate English modesty codes by reciting them. Then the first hip-hop records crossed the pond, and we discovered that American boast- ing could be highly entertaining when rhymed by an MC over a beat. A theory circulated among my peers that all Americans were wankers, and that was the reason they found it so difficult to under- stand the meaning of ‘wanker’. They were full of themselves, they were putting on airs, they were posers, wankers, flash gits, show-offs, bigmouths, know-it-alls.Īmericans, by contrast, were known to be loud and boastful and, worse, to take themselves seriously. There was a lexicon for people who showed insufficient modesty. S orry, would you mind… Sorry, do you think I might… Sorry, but you’re standing on my foot. It was poor form to express self-satisfaction after taking an exam, winning a prize, or really for doing anything at all.Īpologising for the inconvenient fact of your existence, on the other hand, was accepted British self-deprecation. ![]() Any attempt at ‘showing off ’ was brutally demolished by sarcasm. In west London, where I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea of boasting about yourself was almost unthinkable.
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