"Yakety Yak" is a song written, produced, and arranged byJerry Leiber and Mike Stoller forthe Coasters and released onAtco Records in 1958, spending seven weeks as #1 onthe R&B charts and a week at #2 on the Hot 100.[1] 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 therock and roll era.[2]
The song is a "playlet," a word Stoller used for the glimpses into teenage life that characterized the songs he and Lieber wrote and produced.[4] 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."[2] The serio-comic street-smart "playlets" etched out by the songwriters were sung by the Coasters with a sly, clowning humor, while thetenor saxophone ofKing Curtis filled in, in the up-tempodoo-wop style. The group was openly "theatrical" in style — they were not pretending to be expressing their own experience.[5]
The threatened punishments in the song's humorous lyrics are as follows:[6]
"Take out the papers and the trash, or you don't get no spendin' cash"
"If you don't scrub that kitchen floor, you ain't gonna rock and roll no more"
"Just finish cleaning up your room. Let's see that dust fly with that broom. Get all that garbage out of sight, or you don't go out Friday night."
A video of the song was done in "Toon TV", the twelfth episode of the third season ofTiny Toon Adventures, set in the Bronx in 1958 and featuring Plucky Duck, who has been ordered by his father to take out the trash and do the laundry.[14]
The Ripley family sings along to the song in the opening scene of the 1988 filmThe Great Outdoors.[15]
The song is also featured in the 1986 filmStand by Me.
The 1991 all-star charity single "Yakety Yak, Take it Back" featured a substantial rearrangement of the original song with new lyrics by Leiber referencing environmental causes.
^Henke, James; DeCurtis, Anthony (1980).The RollingStone: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music ((3rd Ed.) ed.). New York, N.Y.: Random House, Inc. p. 98.ISBN0-679-73728-6.
^Matos, Michaelangelo (April 13, 2005)."Yakety Yak". Seattle Weekly. Archived fromthe original on 2007-01-01. Retrieved2006-11-08.
^Friedlander, Paul (1996).Rock and Roll: A social history. Boulder, CO: Westview Press (Harper Collins). p. 66.ISBN0-8133-2725-3.
