nyaa nyaa/ naa naa

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> In fact a closer melodic match (than "The Night…") is the first
> two lines of "A tisket, a tasket/a green and yellow basket", but
> that's not a taunt.  Wonder if the tune played a role, though.
> As for taunts, the opening lyrics of the
>
> na na NA na
> na na NA na
> hey hey
> goodbye
>
> --sung by the fans in Comiskey Park in Chicago when a
> pitcher for the other team has been knocked out of the game
> by the White So--may be related, although the tune is different.
> It's definitely a na-na taunt, in any case.

The man responsible for that chorus -- in the Steam song rather
imprecisely titled "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" -- died
recently:

---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/arts/music/paul-leka-a-songwriter-of-na-na-hey-hey-dies-at-68.html
In 1969, Mr. Leka was helping a longtime friend from Bridgeport,
Conn., Gary DeCarlo, fill the B-side of a single he was recording for
Buddah. With Mr. Leka on keyboards, they started with a song they had
written years before, a bluesy shuffle called “Kiss Him Goodbye.” But
it filled only two minutes of playing time, and to make sure disc
jockeys would not play it — instead of Mr. DeCarlo’s A-side — they
decided to add a chorus to stretch it to four minutes, beyond the time
limit of most radio formats.
“I started writing while I was sitting at the piano, going ‘na na na
na, na na na na ...’ ” Mr. Leka told Fred Bronson, the author of “The
Billboard Book of Number One Hits.” “Everything was ‘na-na’ when you
didn’t have a lyric.” Mr. DeCarlo added the “hey hey.” They chanted
the chorus at the beginning and end of the original song, and as an
added poison pill left the dummy lyrics in.
---

That would've been a year after Paul McCartney had relied on a
na-na-na chorus for "Hey Jude," and three years after Wilson Pickett's
"Land of a Thousand Dances" (though he borrowed that song's na-na-na
hook from Cannibal & the Headhunters). And of course we could take it
all the way back to "hey nonny nonny."

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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