Yakety Yak


"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 at #2 on the Hot 100. 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.
In 1999, the original 1958 recording on the ATCO label by the Coasters was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Song

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. The lyrics describe the listing of household chores to a kid, presumably a teenager, the teenager's response and the parents' retort — 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." 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.
The threatened punishments in the song's humorous lyrics are as follows:
And the refrain?:

Personnel

Parodies

Other uses in popular culture