| re: Happy Talk racist? | |
| Last Edit: Chromolume 01:39 pm EST 02/20/19 | |
| Posted by: Chromolume 01:31 pm EST 02/20/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Happy Talk racist? - Michael_Portantiere 01:10 pm EST 02/20/19 | |
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| Actually, I once had a rather surprising experience doing a theatre class with a bunch of young teen students. We were looking at "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught," and some of the students thought the song was racist (instead of anti-racist). I was caught off-guard by this. But in discussing the issue further, I realized that they were hearing the message of the song the wrong way, due to the way the lyrics are naturally accented. In other words, they were hearing "you've GOT to be taught" (i.e. "this is what you HAVE to do") as opposed to "you've got to be TAUGHT" (i.e. this is how it happens, by being taught). Once they understood that the key word was "taught" and not "got," they changed their opinion of the song. In terms of "Happy Talk," there really isn't any "fake pidgin" English involved at all - "pidgin" is the wrong term entirely. Maybe the lyric has a bit of awkward grammar, but I don't think that's automatically racist. What the song does have is Hammerstein's typical attempt at dialect - but in coaching songs that use that, I always advise singers to go easy on that language and to try not to call attention to it so much. But this goes for lyrics in Oklahoma, Carousel, and others that attempt the same kind of "folksy" English as well. I think that if the actress playing Bloody Mary sings something that sounds closer to "things you like to do" rather than "things you LAK to do," (just as I'd rather that Curly would sing something closer to "care to swap" than "keer to swap," etc), it wouldn't sound "racist" at all. The problem, though, may be more in the tradition of the song - that we hear past performances in our head, and find it hard NOT to hear it with that more exaggerated sense of language. |
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