Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa

By Benjamin Zimmer (Originally published at Language Log)

Ever since Michael Jackson's unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent. The iTunes sales charts are overwhelmed by Michael Jackson songs: as of this afternoon, New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports, Jackson appears on 41 songs in the iTunes Top 100 singles chart. One of the top songs is "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the infectious opening song from the 1982 album Thriller. The lyrics can be a bit befuddling ("You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable…"), but there's no denying the song's catchiness, especially the chant at the end: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon's largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as "(I) dance" (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is "derivative of kosa 'to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)'; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer."

Makossa hit the big time in 1973, when Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa" became an international hit. The song's origins were hardly auspicious: Dibango originally wrote the song as the B-side to "Mouvement Ewondo," a praise song or "hymn" for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup, held in Cameroon's capital Yaoundé. Here is how Dibango describes coming up with the song in his autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn; on the other I recorded "Soul Makossa," written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents' house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: "Can't you pronounce 'makossa' like everyone else? You stutter: 'mamako mamasa.' You think they're going to accept that in Yaoundé?" The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found "impeccable." But the other side… "Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?"

"Mouvement Ewondo" was a flop, but "Soul Makossa" found its way to New York, where it turned into an underground hit. After heavy rotation on New York's popular black radio station WBLS, the obscure Cameroonian single became a hot commodity. Since the original single was so hard to find, numerous cover versions filled the void (such as this one from the Lafayette Afro Rock Band). The acts covering Dibango's song all imitated his stuttering syllables that playfully mangled the word makossa.

The song is credited with helping to kickstart New York's nascent disco scene, and both the original and the countless cover versions traveled far and wide. It clearly had an effect on young Michael Jackson as he was writing the songs for Thriller, since the breakdown at the end of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" incorporates a variation of Dibango's refrain, deleting a syllable and altering two others:

Dibango: ma ma ko, ma ma sa, ma ko ma ko sa
Jackson: ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma ku sa

Jackson apparently claimed his version was Swahili, but he eventually acknowledged his debt to Dibango and worked out a compensation arrangement in an out-of-court settlement. In 2007, when R&B singer Rihanna released the song "Please Don't Stop The Music" sampling the line from "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," Rihanna got Jackson's permission but not Dibango's. In response, Dibango sued both Rihanna and Jackson earlier this year, seeking 500,000 euros in damages.

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[NNOKO MBOH JOHNSON]

MANU DIBANGO EPITOMISES,CAMEROONS PRIDE IN THE WORLD OF MUSIC.GOD BLESS U

[oyes]

From The New Yorker

POSTSCRIPT MICHAEL JACKSON

The news of Michael Jackson’s death arrived late on Thursday afternoon, and the great outpouring of celebrity eulogies began immediately. Steven Spielberg: “His talent, his wonderment, and his mystery make him legend.” Beyoncé: “He was magic.” John Mayer: “I truly hope he is memorialized as the ’83 moonwalking, MTV-owning, mesmerizing, unstoppable, invincible Michael Jackson.” And, from France, a gracious statement came from Manu Dibango, the seventy-five-year-old African pop pioneer. He mourned the loss of “un artiste exceptionnel, le plus talentueux et ingénieux” (no translation necessary).

Dibango was one of countless people whose lives were changed by Jackson’s music, although in Dibango’s case the changing was mutual. He was born and reared in Cameroon, and was already a local favorite when he recorded a song for the Cameroon soccer team. The result was a 1972 single called “Mouvement Ewondo,” but it was the B side—“Soul Makossa,” a honking, galloping funk track—that was the real hit, in Africa, in Europe, and in America, where it came to be seen as one of the first disco records. A generation of disk jockeys learned to wield the power of the song’s famous introduction: a hard beat, a single guitar chord, and Dibango’s low growl. He named his song after the makossa, a Cameroonian dance, but he stretched the word out, played with it: “Ma-mako, ma-ma-ssa, mako-makossa.”

About a decade later, Dibango was in Paris, listening to the radio at his apartment, when he heard something familiar: those same syllables, more or less, in a very different context. The d.j. was playing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the unconventional first song from “Thriller.” It is more than six minutes long, and although the music is exuberant throughout, the lyrics aren’t as silly as they first sound: paranoia (“Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable/You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable”) gives way to exhortation (“If you can’t feed your baby, then don’t have a baby”) and, eventually, inspiration (“I believe in me/So you believe in you”). The galloping rhythm sounds a bit like “Soul Makossa,” and near the end Jackson acknowledges the debt by singing words that many listeners mistook for nonsense: “Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa.” Soon, Dibango’s phone started ringing. Friends and relatives were calling to offer their congratulations: Michael Jackson was singing his song! But Dibango’s pride turned to puzzlement when he bought the album, only to find that the song was credited to Michael Jackson and no one else.

Dibango eventually worked out a financial agreement with Jackson, and he made his peace with “Thriller,” which might be (depending on how you keep score) the most popular album of all time. Jackson seemed to have made his peace with “Thriller,” too. Although he released four more albums of new music in his lifetime, all multimillion sellers, and although he also had a lifetime’s worth of great songs that predated “Thriller,” he didn’t seem resentful about the album that came to define him. If “Thriller” sometimes obscured his lesser achievements, it also upstaged his greatest disasters: despite the noise from the child-molestation scandals, his mutating appearance, and his escalating eccentricity, those nine songs—almost all of which were released as singles—were louder.

Jackson gradually withdrew from the Top Forty scrum, but his songs never did. In 2007, the pop singer Rihanna had a hit with “Don’t Stop the Music,” which was based on “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” She sings along with the old syllables: “Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa.” Once again, Dibango heard his chant on the radio, and, once again, he noticed that he wasn’t given credit. (Jackson is listed as a co-songwriter, but not Dibango.) And so the process started anew. When Jackson died, Dibango was still waiting for a French court to decide whether he was owed damages for Rihanna’s use of Jackson’s version of Dibango’s chant. When he was asked about this, Dibango replied, through his manager, that it didn’t seem right to talk about it just now. His relationship with Jackson may have been complicated, but his reaction to Jackson’s death wasn’t: he was, he said, “very sad.”

Thursday night in New York was hot—after weeks of rain, it was one of the first real summer nights of the year. Car windows were open all over the city, and just about every station on the radio dial had switched to an all-Michael Jackson format; for the first (and, for all we know, the last) time, it felt as if absolutely everyone was listening to the same songs. Later that night, at least one bar in Brooklyn continued the celebration into the early hours of Friday. If you lived above it, you may have found yourself awake at 3 A.M., listening to a song you knew by heart: that familiar thump, that familiar chant. As Jackson and Dibango and millions of listeners discovered, you can’t escape “Thriller.” But, then, why would you want to?