The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

In The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop, Kyra Gaunt examines black music and asserts that scholars of musicology must include a gendered analysis when addressing Black musical history. Gaunt states that by conducting an intersecting analysis on gender and race, significant processes that are in dialogue between everyday games by girls’ and popular culture can be revealed (pg 93). Gaunt further states that the benefits of analyzing the intertextuality between the specific gendered spheres of music will break down the patriarchy and repressive representations of the feminine aspects of black music in popular culture.

Gaunt’s discussion on how the games that young Black girls play such as the hand clapping, chants, and double-dutch are carried over through time and make their way into the dominating world of hip-hop and commercial realm of the music industry, without due credit to the origin of the sample used for the recordings, is demonstrated by the song “Yes Ma'am” performed by Visti & Meyland produced by Donna D’Cruz for her Rasa Exotica III CD. Interestingly, I find it relevant to note that I purchased this CD at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City in their Music department. Bergdorf’s actually has a musicologist on staff whose job I was told, is to travel the world to find hot and “exotic” music to package and sell at Bergdorf Goodman. The catchy part of the song appears to be performed by young girls in the style of the hand clapping chant/repetition such as “the games Black girls play.” This appropriation of girls' play follows Gaunt’s theory that the collisions of the polar spheres are in a symbiotic or dialogic relationship in which both spheres are creating and refashioning new musical ideas, based on pre-existing material from the other realm (pg. 107).

However, I do wonder if musicologists such as those employed by high end retail establishments like Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, truly think of sampling like that of “Yes Ma'am” as exotic, or if they categorize it as exotic or of a sub-culture, to package, market, and sell the music to the elitist crowd searching for the “what’s hot, what’s new.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrC-clrKTIo