| Yakety Yak | |
| Cover: | Yakety Yak by The Coasters US vinyl A-side.jpg |
| Caption: | A-side label of the U.S. vinyl single |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | the Coasters |
| B-Side: | Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart |
| Released: | April 1958 |
| Recorded: | March 17, 1958 |
| Genre: | Rock and roll |
| Label: | Atco 6116 |
| Producer: | Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller |
| Prev Title: | Gee, Golly |
| Prev Year: | 1958 |
| Next Title: | The Shadow Knows |
| Next Year: | 1958 |
"Yakety Yak" is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for the Coasters and released on Atco Records in 1958, spending seven weeks as #1 on the R&B charts and a week as number one on the Top 100 pop list.[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 the rock and roll era.[2]
In 1999, the original 1958 recording on the ATCO label by the Coasters was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[3]
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 the tenor saxophone of King Curtis filled in, in the up-tempo doo-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]
"You don't get no spendin' cash", for not taking out the papers and the trash
"You ain't gonna rock and roll no more", for not scrubbing the kitchen floor
"You don't go out Friday night", for not cleaning up the bedroom and getting the garbage taken out of the roomAnd the refrain is:
"Yakety yak. Don't talk back."
In the last verse, the parents order their son to tell his "hoodlum friend" outside in the car, that he will not be allowed to go out with him at all for a ride.