Coq au Vin

Yardbird is a slang word for the chicken, usually after having been prepared as a meal. Apparently jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker loved fried chicken, which earned him the nickname “Yardbird,” or most commonly, “Bird.” “Anyone seeking an understanding of American music,” writes Michael Jarrett, “could start by pondering the chicken” (287). Or even, I might add, human culture itself: the excellent PBS documentary, The Natural History of the Chicken (2000) suggests that we must understand the chicken through the stories we have told about it. The chicken isn't simply an animal, but a sign of something other than itself: chickens, like all animals, are symbols representing different relations to larger reality. In other words, any number of issues surround the role of the chicken in human culture: sex, class, race, identity, and other issues. Hence it follows that songs about chickens aren't really about chickens. The name of a couple famous rock bands invoke the chicken, suggesting its importance at least to a few of that music's practitioners. Chicken Shack, Christine Perfect’s first band, named themselves after Jimmy Smith's highly esteemed album released in 1960, Back at the Chicken Shack, the record that popularized the Hammond B-3 organ for a generation of rock musicians. The name of the British quintet, The Yardbirds, also invokes the chicken. Although the band's name would seem to be an homage to Charlie Parker, it also may be an allusion to yet another meaning of yardbird, an untrained military recruit or prison convict. The Yardbirds may have counted on the connotations prompted by this other meaning of the word, to suggest, according to Mike Jarrett, "an outlaw aesthetic that seemed explosive and undisciplined" (287).

A 12-Piece Box Of Tunes And Albums:

The Beastie Boys – “Finger Lickin’ Good” (Check Your Head)
Mel Brown – Chicken Fat (1967)
Cab Calloway – “Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But a Bird” (Are You Hep to the Jive? 22 Sensational Tracks)
Ry Cooder – Chicken Skin Music (1976)
Steve Goodman – “Chicken Cordon Bleus” (Somebody Else’s Troubles)
King Kurt – Big Cock (1986)
Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (1973)
Charles Mingus – “Eat That Chicken” (Oh Yeah)
Jimmy Smith – Back at the Chicken Shack (1960)
Southern Culture on the Skids – “Eight Piece Box” (Peckin’ Party)
Big Joe Turner – “The Chicken and the Hawk (Up, Up and Away)” (Big, Bad & Blue: The Big Joe Turner Anthology)
Link Wray – “Run Chicken Run” (Rumble! The Best of Link Wray)

Hip And Corn

There's hip, and then there's corn, what Louis Armstrong in his autobiography, Swing That Music (1936), calls "corney." Most likely it was Armstrong himself who introduced both of these terms into the American vocabulary. The terms are often used to imply binary oppositions: if hip names some sort of positive existential condition, corney is its opposite. What do we mean by saying something is corney? The terms, vaguely, seem to distinguish the new (the hip) from the old (corn), but corn also seems to mean anything that is déclassé, antiquated, "old-fashioned." Thus hip and corn are what Fredric Jameson calls ideologemes, seemingly neutral or banal words that actually designate different relations to political or cultural domination.

In the late 1930s, by which time swing had caught on, the jazz of the Twenties had become "corney," that is, held in contempt. Previously a slang term within jazz subculture for non-jazz (meaning popular) music, "corney" was redefined by Armstrong in Swing That Music as "the 'razz-mah-jazz' style of the Twenties." It's possibly a metaphor derived from traditional Southern food: fried chicken, barbecue ribs, corn bread, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and collard greens. Thus the word corney implies something common and everyday, ordinary, routine, overly familiar. A basic, if bland, staple. In his marvelous book, Visions of Jazz, Gary Giddins believes that corn is the "negative face" of hip. He writes:

Hip is witty and daring. Corn is meretricious and safe. Hip, because it is honest and takes risks, may withstand passing fashions. Corn incarnates those fashions. (89)

How are we to understand GIddins? Hip implies otherness, subjects standing outside of the dominant culture. To be hip is to be real, that is, authentic or genuine, detached from the mainstream, values associated with individualism, and hence with jazz. In contrast, corn suggests the masses (the corn-fed), that which is common or vulgar, that one is a follower of trends and fashions, and hence artificial. If you're hip, you swing, which is to say, you seek genuine pleasure. You acknowledge desire. If you're corney, you displace and defer pleasure, preferring instead material commodities and promoting utilitarian ethics. You're a creature of duty and of habit.