Street Talk Research Articles

Friendzone réal. par Charles Van Tieghem

Reviewed by: Friendzone réal. par Charles Van Tieghem Maria G. Traub Tieghem, Charles Van, réal. Friendzone. Int. Mickaël Lumière, Manon Azem, Fadili Camara, Eva Danino. Nabi, 2021. From a vintage-style Volkswagen van descend three beautiful twenty-something women, calling to "Titi" to join them. A smiling, obliging young man steps out and follows along. The ladies are headed to a bachelorette party for Alex, one of the three. The camera pans people with glasses and bottles in their hands, frolicking from hotel rooftop to poolside, dancing, drinking, and splashing into the water. The hired, male entertainer performs hip undulations that pantomime sex before the bride-to-be, then removes (off-camera) his bathing brief. This first explicit gesture announces the general theme of the film: mating. Titi, who prefers the name Thibault, is propositioned by a nude male partygoer. It takes Thibault a few seconds to understand what is asked, before he refuses. This unsophisticated, softhearted young man rushes to save an attractive young woman stung by a jellyfish. Using his nursing skills to assist her, he gets to know Rose and begins to feel strongly attracted to her. Lighting and music accentuate the plot line, but Thibault gets in his own way. He is so eager to please, even verbally; he trips over everything he says. On another visit to Rose, a TV movie scene shows copulation in progress. Rose is nonchalant because Thibault is a friend, but his feelings make him uncomfortable. The film wants to be a romantic comedy but becomes tedious and predictable. His three friends decide to help him gain sex appeal. An unusual trio—independent banker Maud, a lesbian, Afro-French nurse Lulu, a co-worker, and newlywed, experienced Alexandra, come together to plan their friend Thibault's makeover. The three are all on-screen so much that it becomes their story about transforming a friend as much as Thibault's quest to win Rose. Rose is hardly present on screen. Their makeover includes physical exercise, African dancing, as well as conversation practice. When Thibault is given instructions for physical maneuvers to stimulate women during sex by lesbian Maud, the film clearly flirts with the pornographic. Lulu gets him to dance lessons and strategizes winning scenarios, while Alex coaches him on how to speak to a woman. Thibault tries out his newfound skills at a bar. He encounters Jennifer, a French version of Kim Kardashian. They begin a steamy, passionate affair, spending time together in empty, self-indulgent ways. Having had enough, Thibault confronts, rebukes, and breaks all relationships and all pretense. Fleeing to Rose, he humbly explains who he is and what his feelings are. This confessional scene is a film cliché, but it continues to please. The movie has feel-good tonality, but there is no real character development or growth. We do not have a substantial backstory to any of the characters; we do not know what Thibault's heart says to his head, likewise for Rose. The nudity and sex talk garner red flags for educators: check institutional policies! The film's language is peppered with contemporary French street talk as well as English. The takeaway message, "Be honest, be yourself," is conveyed after an odyssey in hedonism. [End Page 268] Maria G. Traub Neumann University (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Emergency Department Peer Support Specialist Program.

Emergency Department Peer Support Specialist Program.

L’AMERICÀ PACÍFIC , DE LA COL·LECCIÓ “ISARD”: ENTRE LA CENSURA I LA RECERCA D’UN NOU LLENGUATGE LITERARI

(Català)This study constitutes an approximation to the vicissitudes of translation into Catalan during the 1960s and the struggle of publishers and translators to find a model of genuine Catalan literary language closer to street talk. To do so, it takes into account a pioneering series at that time, “Isard” (Vergara Publishers), and more specifically the translation of a well-known text and author in Europe and the USA, The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. It was adapted by one of the translators at that time, Eulàlia Presas, who was sensitive to seeking a literary Catalan, closer to contemporary language.

Tuwim’s Dialogues with Banality

The article examines the relation between Tuwim’s poetry and modern colloquial language. The avant-garde artists for whom in the beginning of the 20th-century art was an elite occupation, treated every-day speech as a mass form of communication. Tuwim’s poetry was frequently criticised for banality. Matywiecki presents the poet as a hero fighting with the demon of commonness. The crucial thesis of the article is that banality which is modified in a creative way says more about the epoch than elitist visions. In his poetry, satire and cabaret work Tuwim transformed triviality into dialog and a common human being into a creative person. Transition of the street talk into original speech is the defence against reducing individual being to cliché which means the fear of 20th-century killing ideologies.

‘ ¡Quién fuera noche para caerle encima!’ Piropos in Chile: Sexual harassment or ?irtation?

Piropos, a type of ?irtatious street talk, are a discourse practice that social movements against street harassment in Chile have condemned for their male chauvinist and sexist content. This paper analyzes the structure of piropos to see their effects in both the way piropos portray women, and the discourse piropos promote and/or maintain towards women. From a compendium (Memoria chilena, 2008), 67 piropos were selected and grouped based on the conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003) they use to represent women in society. Conceptual metaphors represented women as religious entities, food, criminals or offenders, and objects found in nature. A ?fth metaphor included under the label ‘trans?guration’ represents the objecti?cation of the one uttering the piropo in order to get closer to the receiver of this discourse practice. The methodology considered (1) power and social distance (Poynton, 1989; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992) to understand the relationship between the participants of this practice, and (2) transitivity (Halliday, 2014) to understand how lexical choices of both processes and participants re?ect how human experience is expressed. The analysis revealed that the piropos analyzed use several resources to perpetuate a male chauvinist discourse that objecti?es women and considers them as inferior and, generally, powerless.

Introduction: Space, bodies and boundaries Piropos and other forms of flirtatious street talk as contested discursive practices

Introduction: Space, bodies and boundaries Piropos and other forms of flirtatious street talk as contested discursive practices

Street talk and Bourdieusian criminology: Bringing narrative to field theory

The work of Bourdieu has increasingly gained interest in criminology. His theoretical framework is rich and arguably the most sophisticated approach to social inequality and difference in sociology. It has however, been criticized for bias towards the structural aspects of social life, and for leaving little space for the constitutive, and creative role of language. We argue for the inclusion of narrative for understanding street fields. Based on qualitative interviews with 40 incarcerated drug dealers in Norway, we describe the narrative repertoire of the street field, including stories of crime business, violence, drugs and the ‘hard life’. The narrative repertoire is constituted by street capital, but also upholds and produces this form of capital. Street talk is embedded in objective social and economic structures and displayed in the actors’ habitus. Narratives bind the street field together: producing social practices and social structure.

Robert M. Buffington.A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910.

In the first three chapters of A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910, Robert M. Buffington reconstructs working-class demands for effective citizenship as they appeared in Mexico City’s penny press. In the last two chapters, he extracts the penny press’s editors’ views of working-class “masculine subjectivity” in relationship to women. His evidence is drawn mainly from a close reading of three prominent examples of the penny press in the decade before the Mexican Revolution: La Guacamaya, El Diablito Rojo, and El Diablito Bromista. Buffington carefully deconstructs their mastheads, the iconographic meaning of the graphics, the allegorical meaning of the images, etc. Particularly useful are the author’s textual analysis of the penny press’s popular columns called “street talk.” Presented in the presumed vernacular of working-class Mexicans, Buffington translates and analyzes the penny press’s rendition of the satirical, often rude and vulgar, and almost always hilarious dialogue. One wonderful example is the exchange between two friends arguing over the merits of the controversial book by Francisco Bulnes, El verdadero Juárez (92–93).

Rhetorically (De)constructing AIDS

Framed by ideas such as Rick Lee’s “AIDS literacy,” Samuel Delany’s “street talk” and “straight talk,” and Gérard Genette’s understanding of paratext as “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction ,” I question what types of rhetorical modes work well for discussing diseases, like AIDS, in fantasy texts. AIDS and literacy are intimately connected because, as Lee explains, “the emergence of AIDS involved the need to become knowledgeable with the various terms then circulating as references to ‘the AIDS virus.’” That is, disease necessitates new discourses to properly facilitate both biomedical (what Delany refers to as “straight talk”) and culturally informed (what Delany refers to as “street talk”) discussions; therefore, the rhetorical choices we make become essential to our understandings of disease. T. E. Apter declares that fantasy writers must create a new language “either because some new, unknown order prevails, or because the former order functions haphazardly or piecemeal”: the introduction of AIDS, like the fantastic, creates a new order—fragmenting previous world meanings. In this article, I determine whether Samuel R. Delany’s two modes of talking about AIDS are sufficient for discussing disease (AIDS in New York and the unnamed “plague” in Kolhari) in Flight from Nevèrÿon . I discuss why a balance between “straight talk” and “street talk” is needed to change how AIDS is both perceived and discussed and propose dialogue as the key to discussing illness and disease.

Participation in driver education/training courses during graduated driver licensing, and the effect of a time-discount on subsequent traffic offenses: Findings from the New Zealand Drivers Study

IntroductionThe New Zealand GDL includes a time-discount at the restricted license stage, for attendance at an approved driver education course. This is despite international evidence showing that earlier licensure associated with a time-discount can increase risk for newly licensed drivers. ObjectiveTo examine participation in driver education courses and especially those that qualify for a time-discount; compare the profiles of course participants with non-participants; examine reasons for participation; and examine the association between a time-discount and traffic offenses once fully licensed. MethodThis study was based on the New Zealand Drivers Study (NZDS), a prospective cohort study of newly licensed drivers. Data on driver education courses were obtained at the full license interview (n=1763), driver license and traffic offense data from the NZ Driver Licence Registry, and other data at the NZDS interviews. Results94% had heard of and 49% (n=868) participated in a defensive driving course (DDC). No other course had more than 1% participation. Compared with the others, the DDC group were young, non-Māori, and from an area of relatively low deprivation. Through GDL, the DDC group were relatively more compliant with the conditions, and less likely to crash or receive a traffic offense notice. The groups did not differ on personality, alcohol and drug use. The reason most (85%) attended a DDC was to get their full license sooner; 86% (n=748) received a time-discount. The time-discount group were 40% more likely to receive a traffic offense notice on their full license; this reduced to 10% after controlling for other factors. Conclusion and practical implicationsThe results of this study, when viewed in conjunction with other NZ crash evidence, indicate that a time-discount should not be given for completing a DDC or Street Talk course.

Review of Joe Mulholland and Tom Hojnacki, The Berklee Book of Jazz Harmony (Berklee Press, 2013) and Dariusz Terefenko, Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study (Routledge, 2014)

[1] Jazz theory texts have certainly come a long way since the 1970s and 1980s, when generalities and street talk often took precedence over serious academic rigor. The textbooks under review here are both robust volumes with much to offer the educated musician. Joe Mulholland and Tom Hojnacki primarily address jazz harmony-though they cannot avoid touching upon other fronts-in a way that is at once both conservative and forward-looking. They are the chairs of the Harmony Department at the Berklee College of Music, and their textbook, The Berklee Book of Jazz Harmony, presents a system that has been taught there since the 1960s.(1) The scope of Dariusz Terefenko's Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study is considerably broader. It addresses topics that do not always appear in jazz theory texts, such as jazz rhythm, music fundamentals (a very thorough treatment), and even post-tonal jazz with a primer on pc-set theory.[2] Both books include digital audio resources. Terefenko provides a play-along DVD and a companion website.(2) The website is open to everyone, requiring no password and stipulating no window of time for user access. It features ear-training exercises, recordings of examples, appendices, and an extensive workbook of written exercises. Mulholland and Hojnacki provide a CD with recordings of original compositions that serve as examples in the text. The Berklee Book would benefit from including some opportunities for readers' self-assessment. However, for the present edition such objectives are somewhat beyond (or peripheral to) the intent of the book, which is simply to introduce Berklee's harmonic system to new readers.[3] Despite their differences, these books do have enough in common to invite comparison. Consider the following passages, excerpted from relatively early chapters in each, where the authors differentiate jazz from other tonal musics. Mulholland and Hojnacki do this at the very outset:One thing that distinguishes mainstream jazz harmony from other tonal styles is the tremendous amount of harmonic color that arises due to the pervasive use of tertian extensions of the basic chord types. Jazz musicians refer to these notes as tensions.Jazz harmony is also characterized by a strong progressive drive or forward propulsion analogous to the rhythmic character of the music. (1)While the authors dedicate most of their energy to explaining jazz's "tremendous amount of harmonic color," they pay more than lip service to the "forward propulsion analogous to the rhythmic character of the music." In several cases, they even go so far as to consider how that propulsion works within jazz's rhythmic framework (a topic addressed in more detail below).[4] Terefenko makes a comparable statement that summarizes an introduction to tonic, pre-dominant, and dominant functions:As will be demonstrated time and time again, functional tonality in jazz has different properties than that of common-practice classical music. These properties are represented by a unique set of rules dictating the unfolding of harmonic function, voice-leading conventions, and the overall behavior of chord tones and chordal extensions. (26)Shortly thereafter, he makes the following observation about the relationship between harmony and rhythm, which further aligns his theory of jazz with that of Berklee's method:In this early exposition of harmonic progressions, we cannot ignore other important factors that contribute to the concept of tonality, such as metric placements and duration of chords. (31-32)[5] Claims that jazz is a different kind of tonal music are hardly profound. However, they are significant simply because jazz theory texts do not normally make such observations. These authors use similar differentiations to situate their discourses within spaces that allow critical inquiry from academically informed readers. In doing so, they establish points of departure for presenting innovative ideas on such topics as harmony and form. …

Philosophy of the City: Hymn to the Polis. On the Right to the City

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (Wittgenstein, 1953, para. 18) I want to reverse Wittgenstein's (1953) comment in the Philosophical Investigations and use it as a hymn to the polis, to the city as a place for philosophy. What better spatial metaphor for language than the ancient city? Yet the city as a language also has its tropic attraction: as the collection of tongues, of street talk, of noises that are part of the cultural hubbub, of the language of the growth of urban form and architecture, and of the city map. (Reading the city: How do I get around? It presupposes local knowledge as opposed to universal knowledge.) Place is that which holds meaning for us. Place precedes space that is the bounded and abstractly defined territory. Place is wedded to concepts of 'situatedness', 'embeddedness', 'context' giving rise to 'situated cognition', 'embedded rationality' and 'local knowledge'. Place is the counterpoint to a philosophy of the body based on walking, talking, observing. In 'Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline. The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (the Example of an International Institution)' (3) Derrida (1999) says: I will begin with the question, 'where?' Not directly with the question, 'where are we?' or 'where have we come to?' but 'where does the question of the right to philosophy take place?,' which can be immediately translated by 'where ought it take place?'

Entertainment-Education and Strategic Communication: A Case Study of Sesame Workshop's “Talk, Listen, Connect” Initiative for Military Families

The Sesame Street Talk, Listen, Connect (TLC) initiative is a multimedia example of Entertainment-Education that leveraged the popular Sesame Street platform to deliver key information to military families about how to communicate with children about feelings related to deployment and homecomings, and other tough issues related to military life. This paper is organized as an in-depth case study of the TLC initiative, including interviews with key program developers. The research analyzes the TLC initiative as an exemplar of Entertainment-Education, and compares this example of Entertainment-Education to a strategic communication model. Known and accepted models of strategic communication that appear widely in the literature were referenced. To develop an Entertainment-Education model, a review of the relevant literature was conducted and social cognitive theory, elaboration likelihood model and diffusion of innovation theory were employed as foundational theoretical frameworks. Recommendations for future research on Entertainment-Education as a type of strategic communication are included.

Makin' It, by Keeping It Real: Street Talk, Rap Music, and the Forgotten Entrepreneurship From “the ’Hood”

This article deals with rap music and with two distinct discourses in which rap artists habitually engage. It also deals with the way that one, in these, can find a dialectic between the special and the mundane, between succeeding—makin' it—and remaining loyal to the values of your community or culture—keeping it real. Furthermore, it deals with how the rap star Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter handles this dialectic, positing entrepreneurship as both a politics and an ethic, and how we, by reading his lyrics, are led to some forgotten localities in academic research—the disenfranchised, urban, marginalized, entrepreneurial “’hood.”

A Place at the Table: Hot Springs and the GI Revolt

ON JUNE 14, 1946, THE ARKANSAS GAZETTE reported that a retired marine, Lt. Col. Sid McMath, and a group of his fellow World War II veterans were staging a GI Revolt in Garland County. They intended to oust the entrenched political machine of Hot Springs mayor Leo P. McLaughlin, who was identified as the kingpin of a corrupt and illegal gambling industry in the spa city.' Subsequent newspaper articles and historical narratives continued to use the term revolt to describe the entrance of World War IT veterans into Arkansas politics, citing McMath and the Garland County GIs as the pioneers and the most conspicuous examples of this phenomenon. Encouraged by the rhetoric of the GIs themselves, writers have repeated the story that the GIs, having so recently fought totalitarianism abroad, were eager to make Arkansas safe for democracy by bringing fair and honest government to their own communities.2 A number of accounts do acknowledge that a more complex mixture of idealism and ambition went into the revolt, but few have taken a very close look at the personalities and backgrounds of the men involved.3 The war-hero imagery that the veterans themselves indulged obscures what appears to have been profound differences within the Garland County group that fought the McLaughlin machine. Although some of them were war heroes, others were not even veterans. Some among the GIs wanted to rid Hot Springs of illegal gambling while others supported it. Some of the candidates may have decided to seek office because of their war experiences, but at least two of them were pursuing longstanding dreams of holding public office. And while some invited themselves to the table, others took a place already set for them. Still, whatever their motives or background may have been, the GIs possessed a common interest in securing honest elections in Garland County in 1946. Accomplishing that would earn them a place in Arkansas history. Garland County was certainly a community in need of political change. For as long as most citizens could remember, political and economic power had been concentrated in the hands of Hot Springs mayor Leo P. McLaughlin's political machine, which protected and was supported by an illegal but open casino gambling industry.4 While many local citizens did not necessarily object to gambling, which provided jobs in a rather underdeveloped area, they were dissatisfied with the attendant corruption in their local government and their limited access to the political process. The little resort's gambling history reached as far back as the late 1800s. After several interruptions, legal parimutuel betting on horse races became a permanent fixture in 1934. Fashionable casinos and back street dives openly offered illegal gambling both to high rollers and penny-ante players.s Places such as the Belvedere Club and the Tower Club on the edge of the city and the chic Southern Club on Central Avenue catered to casino gambling as well as bookmaking. Slot machines were stuck in back rooms of small cafes and taverns, out of the way, but certainly not hidden. There was no need to hide the gambling devices because local officials, including those in law enforcement, accepted illegal gaming as part of the heritage of Hot Springs, and state officials often pretended to be completely unaware of it. Occasionally, in response to social reformers or political pressure, the gambling halls were raided and closed briefly. They never remained so for long.6 Since his election as mayor in 1927, McLaughlin and cohorts such as Circuit Judge Earl Witt and Municipal Judge Vernal Ledgerwood had operated a tightly controlled political machine that directed city and county politics and regulated the illegal gambling industry. Many people thought Ledgerwood actually ran the machine while McLaughlin was merely its figurehead. Street talk sometimes credited unknown gangsters or underworld gambling figures with calling the shots for the whole operation. …

Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage"

Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to compelling identification of the as the originary moment of the black diasporic migration. In his well-known modernist poem Middle Passage (1945), Robert Hayden presents redemptive critique of the past through melange of imagined voices that ultimately articulates passage through suffering to affirmation. More recently, in her widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison turns to the to chart the possibilities for individual and communal agency in the face of radical dislocation and systematic terror. Charles Johnson's controversial postmodern allegory of African American history, (1990), places its protagonist on mid-Atlantic voyage that radically alters his conception of personal identity, leading him to understand the self as fluid rather than fixed, formed by each person's confrontation with an Other. Finally, in an important recent critical work, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy attempts to rethink modernity through the history of the black Atlantic, seeing in its process of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity challenge to established categorizations of history and nationalist definitions of culture (2). Contrasting with traditional narratives of the search for origins in some utopian or prelapsarian past, these figurative returns to the troubled history of the are suggestive of black writers' continuing struggle with issues of identity and representation in their art. In Slave Trade: View from the Passage (1994), Clarence Major makes his own distinctive voyage across the Atlantic in poem that is devastating in its attack on the discourse of empire and subtle in its analysis of the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning an identity through art. In contrast to the speakerly text Henry Louis Gates describes as characteristic of fiction growing out of the African American folk idiom, Major's poetry typically offers instead what might be called painterly text - one that presents readers with complex collage of historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, street talk, cartoons, puns, folk tales, children's songs, advertising slogans, and references to international locales. A talented painter as well as writer, Major has recently described himself as a visual thinker, one who tends to make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones (McCaffery and Kutnik 132). Building its critique through images drawn from specific art works and from repeated themes in Western iconography, Slave Trade draws heavily on Major's technique of associative collage to document European culture's normalization of its own history of conquest through the representation of black people in hierarchical history of progress. By drawing upon actual works of art to illustrate the various ways in which blackness has been framed by the designs of others and by offering its own reconfigurations of specific European landscapes, Major's poem ultimately raises difficult questions about representation, self-expression, and the emancipatory potential of art, while simultaneously delineating the special province of the painterly text. I. Hope, Fallacious Hope / Where is Your Market, Now? - J. M. W. Turner, from poem displayed with his painting The Slave Ship (1840)(1) Charting dizzying route over three continents and several time periods, Slave Trade is composed of four major sections that move from the African past, to Europe, to the Americas, and, finally, to the present-day United States. From this comprehensive vantage point the poem attempts to negotiate the crisscrossing conceptual routes of triangular trade whose operating principles are Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. …

Complex (Street Talk Recorded)

Complex (Street Talk Recorded)

Laurie Anderson for Dummies

If language is a virus from outer space, performance is its downlink in the United States-and Laurie Anderson one of its most uncanny transmitters. Since the late I96os, Anderson's homey yet alien work has been short-circuiting the often great divides between street talk and philosophy, popular culture and experimental art, everyday life and its electronic ghost. Her preferred medium: an electric body in which gestures, stories, and songs mix with synthesizers, video projections, printed matter, and, most recently, personal computers. Over the years, this electric body has grown in crystalline fashion, its fractal structure reiterating and recombining simple components into diversifying assemblages. In 1974, Anderson performed Duets on Ice on the streets of New York, standing in skates with blades frozen in ice and playing cowboy songs on the Self-Playing Violin-an instrument whose music unwinds from magnetic tape loops. Twenty years later, this small bit haunts the edges of her latest media blitz, a storm of coordinated releases that include a worldwide tour of The Nerve Bible, two music CDs, a retrospective book, a proposal for a

New day in Babylon: the Black power movement and American culture, 1965-1975

With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg has written the most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power movement - and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and the larger American culture. New Day in Babylon chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther Party and the separatism of the Nation of Islam to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new black aesthetic. If its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution - one in culture and consciousness that has changed the context of race in America. Drawing on a remarkable range of cultural expressions, from the voice of Malcolm X to the music of James Brown, from urban folklore, the visual arts, and religion to the language of soul, Van Deburg extracts the enduring cultural and psychological themes that ran through the ideologies of Black Power politics. For Van Deburg, Black Power was, underneath it all, a revolt rooted in culture - both high and low - as artists, writers, performers, politicians, and ordinary people alike begin to assert a distinctive African-American worldview and way of being. His book is a finely textured rendering of the years when the rhetoric of the gun gave way to an explosion of cultural forms that, in celebrating the uniqueness of African-American life, carried forward the militant philosophy of resistance, pride, and self-esteem. Like activists in the sixties and seventies, African-Americans today mobilize a rich variety of cultural resources in the struggle for group identity and racial justice. Whether in the filmsof Spike Lee or other new black directors, in rap music, or in experiments in Afrocentric education, African-Americans continue to reshape the contours of American values, ideals, and attitudes. This is the real legacy of the Black Power movement. And it has never been demonstra

Du-Wop and Dialectic

M ?USIC IS A product of its environment; it is experience transformed into sound. The materialization of this experience will vary according to the socioeconomic milieu and consciousness of the composer. As a Puerto Rican who was raised in New York City, I can remember clearly as a twelve-year-old hearing the chants of street gangs passing by our housing project at 1:00 A.M., and singing groups harmonizing on the street corner. I have been able to recall some of this sonic material and express it in the form of motives, harmonies, shouts, themes, and so forth, which have served as the basis of some of my compositions. The following works incorporate a specific element or elements of this urban streetlore, and, I would hope, comprise a kind of cultural anthropological study of urban street life which, by the way, was not my intention when composing these works. 124 E. 107th St. (1979) for six percussionists, narrator-actor, and electronic tape, is a music theater piece incorporating urban environmental sounds with a text mostly written in a black vernacular expression or street talk. I approach this street talk or verbal jazz more as a sound than a language, swinging with a continuously driving rhythmic flow and always managing to come out metered. There are certain inflections and cadences, meaningful and communicative, which express one of the most creative and musical uses of the English language. This verbal soul-jazz is a fundamental aspect of urban streetlore. Some examples of this spoken soul in the text (written by Pedro Pietri) of124 E. 107th St. are: bopping thru the hereafter, rapping to neon tombstones...; teaching the clouds how to nod. .. why do those bastards sleep so late knowing how strung out some of their best customers are, he mumbles thru the vomit falling out his trembling mouth; ... and he has nothing to do but hang out. ; ... until the pusher informs him that he is straight and it will be time to shoot up.. was hungry, you was unemployed.. .; . and for wanting to stay alive you go busted; ... everybody tuned into something else while you blew a lifetime...; etc. This sampling is enough evidence of the richness and flavor of street talk. To the soul-less ear most