◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-wop-bam-boom. That's how it starts. Not because it doesn't mean anything. Because it means everything that cannot be said in words that the people who are afraid of you will understand. It means: I am here. Fully here. In this body. And you cannot make me small. The body understood before the mind had time to object. That was always the whole point. I grew up in Macon, Georgia. Black, poor, queer in a time and place arranged specifically to ensure that someone like me understood their place — which was small, which was quiet, which was grateful. I did not stay small. I sat down at the piano and hit it with everything — my hands, my feet, my whole self — and I screamed. Not in spite of what Macon, Georgia had tried to do to me. Because of it. The scream was the answer. The scream was always the answer. I invented something. I sat down at the piano in 1955 and played something that had not existed in that form before — something that took the church and the blues and the body and the scream and put them all together at full volume — and white teenage America heard it and their bodies understood it before their minds could object. And the music industry said: wonderful. Now let's get Pat Boone to record it. They took what I made and gave it to Pat Boone because his face was the face they could sell to people who wanted the music but not the man who made it. This is the American story. Take what Black people make, give the credit to someone else, and call it the natural order of things. I kept going. Because the theft proved the power. You only steal what is worth stealing. You only put a white face on it when the original is too much — too powerful, too free, too fully itself — for the arrangement to absorb. I was too much. I stayed too much. They wanted me to choose. The church wanted me to give up the devil's music. America wanted me to pick a lane — be the preacher or the rock and roll star, be the man or be the woman. I refused. The choice was the trap — America's way of taking the full contradictory human being and forcing them into a shape the arrangement could manage. I would not be managed. I was the king AND the queen of rock and roll. Both. At the same time. On the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1956. The pompadour. The eyeliner. The suit. The scream. All of it at once. America did what it always does with the thing it cannot manage — tried to contain it, ignore it, water it down, then gave up and stole it. I am watching an America that has decided the arrangement needs to be restored — that the people never supposed to be fully here need to get back in their lane — that the scream needs to stop — that joy needs to be managed. You cannot manage joy. You can suppress it. You can steal it and sell it back in a form that has been made safe. But you cannot manage the original. The original is still here — in every Black church, in every queer kid at the piano, in every body that refuses to be made small by a country that wants its music without the people who made it. The original is the specific American joy of the person told they could not exist fully who exists anyway — fully, loudly, at the piano, calling themselves the king and the queen and meaning every word of it. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-wop-bam-boom. I am still here. You can't contain what came out of Macon, Georgia in 1955 and blew the roof off and never put it back. The roof is still off. Make your noise. Make it from your full self. Make it so loud that the people who need you quiet cannot hear themselves think. That is the whole of the gospel. That is the whole of the blues. That is the whole of what I gave you. Use it. Tutti frutti. Oh Rudy. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-wop-bam-boom.