This was written by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had written Elvis Presley's hits "Hound Dog" and Jailhouse Rock." "Yakety Yak" was one of several hits they wrote for The Coasters. In the song, a kid is being scolded by his parents for not doing his chores. There are lots of social implications that can be read into this song, which was written by two Jewish men and sung by a black vocal group. In the book The History of Rock, Bill Millar writes: "The Coasters were clearly irreverent and opposed institutions that white adults held in high esteem. Authority, parents, fidelity, hard work, piety and the suppression of risky pleasures were questioned with a blood and subversive wit. Jews (Leiber and Stoller) and Southern blacks (the Coasters) were expected to show gratitude towards the system. Instead they stood up and criticized it, a theme that can be recognized in almost all their songs."
In the song, a kid is being scolded by his parents for not doing his chores. There are lots of social implications that can be read into this song, which was written by two Jewish men and sung by a black vocal group. In the book The History of Rock, Bill Millar writes: "The Coasters were clearly irreverent and opposed institutions that white adults held in high esteem. Authority, parents, fidelity, hard work, piety and the suppression of risky pleasures were questioned with a blood and subversive wit. Jews (Leiber and Stoller) and Southern blacks (the Coasters) were expected to show gratitude towards the system. Instead they stood up and criticized it, a theme that can be recognized in almost all their songs." This was written by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had written Elvis Presley's hits "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock." "Yakety Yak" was one of several hits they wrote for The Coasters.
"Yakety Yak" is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for the Coasters and released on Atco Records in 1958, spending seven weeks as #1 on the R&B charts and a week as number one on the Top 100 pop list. This song was one of a string of singles released by the Coasters between 1957 and 1959 that dominated the charts, making them one of the biggest performing acts of the rock and roll era.
Song
The song is a "playlet," a word Stoller used for the glimpses into teenage life that characterized the songs Leiber and Stoller wrote and produced. The lyrics describe the listing of household chores to a kid, presumably a teenager, the teenager's response ("yakety yak") and the parents' retort ("don't talk back") — an experience very familiar to a middle-class teenager of the day. Leiber has said the Coasters portrayed "a white kid’s view of a black person’s conception of white society." The serio-comic street-smart "playlets" etched out by the songwriters were sung by the Coasters with a sly clowning humor, while the tenor saxophone of King Curtis filled in, in the up-tempo doo-wop style. The group was openly "theatrical" in style—they were not pretending to be expressing their own experience.
The threatened punishment for not taking out the garbage and sweeping the floor is, in the song's humorous lyrics:
In the last verse, the parents order their son to tell his "hoodlum friend" outside in the car, that he won't be allowed to go out with him at all for a ride.
Responses