Jockomo Jockomo

I've been listening to Our New Orleans, a post-Katrina benefit album of some of New Orleans' best musicians, which of course got me to pondering a venerable question.  Just what does Iko Iko mean?

A little poking around discovers that there are a great many versions of the song Iko Iko itself (no surprise) and that the first two were put out by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford (under the title Jock-o-mo) and the Dixie Cups (under the title Iko Iko). Neither of these makes any claim of originality.  Both Crawford and the Dixie Cups freely admit that they merely repeated what they'd heard, Crawford from Mardi Gras Indian chants, the Dixie Cups from their grandmother (who in turn probably heard it at Mardis Gras).  This much is pretty clear, but little else is.  In particular, what do the words mean and, prerequisite to that, what are the words?

The second question can only be answered approximately, since the song has been covered so many times, often (probably nearly always) by performers with little or no idea of its possible meaning.  This in turn has led to disputes on the order of "Is it chockomo, jockomo, jock-o-mo or what?" "Is it Iko or Aiko"  "Is it wa na ne or ah na ne?" and so forth.  Keeping in mind that individuals' accents and enunciation may vary and that language itself is fairly shifty, a reasonable rendition of the mystery lyrics is:

Hey now, Hey now
Iko, Iko, an day
Jockomo fee no wah na nay
Jockomo fee na nay

Interpretations vary. One is:

Code language!
God is watching
Jacouman causes it; we will be emancipated
Jacouman urges it; we will wait.

Another is

Hey now! Hey now!
Listen, listen at the back
Jocomo made our king be born
Jocomo made it happen.

What's to pick between them?

Explanations are also offered for pieces here and there. Who or what is "Jockomo"? No less an authority than Dr. John says Jockomo is a jester. A linguist familiar with Native American trade languages says that chockema feena means "very good" in a now-extinct jargon. What does Iko Iko mean? A Ghanaian linguist says that Ayeko Ayeko is found in a West African chant and means "Well done, congratulations".

Why would it be so difficult to track down the meaning of a song heard and sung by millions? For a start, New Orleans is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, let alone the United States. As Dr. John says, it's a place where "Nothing is purely itself but becomes part of one funky gumbo." Add to that the complex nature of the ingredients themselves — Creole culture, Hatian culture, French and other European cultures, hundreds of West African and Native American languages/dialects, and so forth, many lost or only recently recorded — it would seem almost inevitable that origins become hard to trace.

It's clear from even casual comparison that the song has deep and direct African musical roots. This again is hardly surprising for New Orleans, but some cases are more obvious than others (Louis Armstrong's classic What a Wonderful World seems less obviously African-influenced). It also pretty clear that the rhythms came to the Mardi Gras Indians by way of the Caribbean, in particular Haiti, whose Kata rhythms are clearly similar (compare this and this, for example). The origins of a tune aren't necessarily the same as the origins of its lyrics, but it's not implausible that the Mardi Gras Indians' chants are also Caribbean in origin.

The two translations given above, different though they are, both accord with that general backdrop. The first, based on notes unfortunately lost in the Storm along with so many other cultural treasures, uses a mixture of Yoruba (West African) and Creole French.

The second translation is better documented, at least, and is pure Louisiana Creole:

• akou(t) = French ecoute = listen
• an deye = French en derrière = in back
• Jockomo is a name, possibly Giacomo, possibly "little Jacques"
• fi = French fit = made
• no wa = French notre roi = our king
• ne = French né = born
• the particle na, being peculiar to Creole, makes it "to be born"

This all seems reasonable enough, particularly since the Creole words given all exist in other sources, the words are in the right order and the meaning, while a bit puzzling, is not a complete word salad.  But while the general drift seems reasonable, I'm not entirely convinced.

For example, while "Hey now, listen all the way in the back!" makes sense and fits with Mardi Gras chiefs facing off and taunting each other, wouldn't the accent on akout be on the last syllable, not the first?  More troubling, though, is the use of the phrase Jockomo feena nay in other places, such as the Wild Magnolias' Brother John is Gone/Herc Jolly John (which is what brought us here in the first place):

Jockomo feena nay, Jockomo feena nay
If you don't like what the Big Chief say
Then jockomo feena nay!

This fits better with another gloss that's been given: "Joker, kiss my ass" (or similar). The Magnolias also exhort the audience to "make Jockomo any way you want", which casts a little doubt on Jockomo being a personal name.

As to the Yoruba/Creole interpretation, I have no idea, except that "code language" is probably not meant as a literal interpretation, rather that "Hey now" (or "Ena" or whatever) is a code meant to call people together. Which seems, um, probable. Again, though, "Jocouman will emancipate us" doesn't seem a likely riposte to someone who doesn't like what the Big Chief says.  On the other hand, if the original meaning had been lost, more likely in the case of the Yoruba hypothesis, then perhaps a now-nonsensical string of syllables could be turned into a taunt simply by use as such.


So, what to make of all this?  Until someone can come up with something more definitive, like a written record from the 19th century, we're really reading tea leaves.  I find the Creole idea the best of the lot, but I wouldn't want to say it's "the" definitive meaning.

More interesting, though, is the way that the funky gumbo, where nothing is purely itself, leads us on a fascinating journey of guesswork with only a provisional, incomplete resolution.  That's New Orleans for you.



Sources:

• Wikipedia on Iko Iko, which also cites
• Mudcat Cafe post on the meaning of Iko Iko [now deleted, but see here]
• Offbeat article In Search of Jockomo
• an apparently anonymous PDF on Iko Iko

On the nature of change in science

Hmm ... wonder if anyone's ever tackled this subject before ...

These days, schools across the nation teach a scientific theory that has been known for decades to be fundamentally wrong, while the much more accurate theories that supplanted it are generally only mentioned briefly outside advanced courses aimed at specialists.  How can this scandal go on?

I'm speaking, of course, of Newtonian mechanics, with its tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest and an equal and opposite reaction for every action.  The crowning achievements of 20th-century physics, namely relativity and quantum mechanics (QM), arose from discoveries that the predictions of Newtonian mechanics simply don't hold under certain conditions (now if only they could be made to play nicely with each other).

Granted, the conditions in question are extreme.  Quantum effects generally don't matter outside submicroscopic scales, and relativistic effects are only easily noticeable at extremely high speeds or in extremely strong gravitational fields.  Nonetheless, the effects are of more than purely scientific interest.  The GPS system, for example, could not have been built without knowledge of quantum effects (for the chips in the satellites and receivers for example) and relativistic effects (which cause the highly accurate clocks, needed in order to pinpoint location, to run slightly faster in orbit than on the ground).

So why do we cling to this outmoded theory?  Simple.  It gives the right answers in the kind of cases most people will encounter.  How fast would that car have to have been going to have skidded for the distance it did?  Newton can handle that one.  What are the stresses on the deck of that bridge?  Newton can deal with it.  Why do the daily tides rise and fall?  Newton himself did the numbers on that one.  Why does the orbit of Mercury precess just a wee bit more than it ought?  Um, actually you need general relativity for that one.

For a new theory to take hold, it has to be more than new.  However much its mechanisms may differ from those of the old theory -- and QM and relativity differ radically from Newton in that respect -- it must still explain the same facts that the old theory explained.  Thus the correspondence principle of QM, which states that QM and classical (Newtonian) mechanics give essentially the same results when large enough numbers are involved.  Given that there are stupefyingly many atoms in anything we can actually see or touch, it's not hard to encounter numbers large enough for the correspondence to hold.  In fact, it generally takes work to narrow things to the point that QM comes to the fore.

A new theory also has to explain some things better than the old theory.  For example, QM explains why subatomic particles don't behave completely like ideal Newtonian particles and relativity explains why planets don't quite exactly follow the paths that classical mechanics predicts.

New theories typically keep most of the concepts of the theories they replace, but often generalize them or interpret them in the new ways.  For example, the conservation laws concerning quantities such as energy, momentum and angular momentum, which were derived from Newton's laws as classical physics developed, play a central role in QM.  Newton's idea that bodies travel in straight lines in the absence of outside forces becomes Einstein's idea that a body in orbit, for example, is traveling in a path that is (locally) straight, but in curved space-time.

Many concepts make it through unchanged, for example the concept of things having mass, or charge, or being able to move.  In fact, most concepts will have to remain unchanged.  The whole field of physics assumes that there is a physical world with space and time, that it's possible to conduct experiments and get reproducible results, and so forth.  These might seem too trivial to mention, but given the sort of things that QM and relativity do revisit, for example to what extent things can have a definite location or whether it's possible to say two things happened at the same time, no concept seems to trivial to count.

Even at its most radical, science is fundamentally conservative.  An established theory, even one with known problems, is assumed to hold until there is compelling reason to adopt a new one, and even in that case the old theory may well remain useful.  I've used physics here as a running example, but the same holds true in any scientific field.

So why do we continually hear about revolutionary advances and theories being overturned?  There are probably several reasons:

• The press needs good, dramatic story lines because that's what we its audience want.
• It's natural to focus on what's changed as opposed to what's still the same.  Even an incremental change at the margins is a dramatic change if you only focus on the margins.
• There's a lot of science going on at any moment.
• Every once in a while something big really does come along.

All of this seems mostly harmless, so long as it doesn't give the impression that the world at large is liable to change drastically overnight.

Learning: Formal and otherwise

In the previous post, I tried to paint (and then poke at) a stereotypical picture of "book learning" vs. "real-world learning," also known as "street smarts" (except there aren't really any proper streets where Bill lives).  Which kind of learning is better?  Depends on which you think you have more of, of course.

Cognitive science is a well-studied discipline with many interesting results on learning and other activities of the mind.  One of its most significant results is that we don't have a single, general learning capacity, but a variety of learning mechanisms.  Learning to ride a bike is different from learning a language is different from learning people's names is different from learning calculus, etc.  There is good experimental evidence to support all this.

In the typical "book learning"/"real-world learning" dichotomy, formal education is held to be narrow and divorced from the world at large.  But formal learning is not a monolith.  Different subjects require different combinations of lecture, research, rote memorization, structured practice, unstructured practice and so forth.  Teaching calculus well is different from teaching the oboe well is different from teaching experimental chemistry well is different from teaching Shakespeare well.

But what is formal education, anyway?  Does it have to take place in a classroom or for course credit?  Coaching a sport well is a highly structured exercise with its own terminology and a well-developed body of theory and practice.  Likewise for apprenticing to a trade.  The very fact of a recognized trade implies a set of rules and conventions -- forms, in other words -- to be followed.  Formality is about such structures, not the particular venue for learning.

Even taking a broader view of formal learning, though, there is plenty going on outside those bounds.  Learning one's first language, or one's culture, or whether one likes bleu cheese, or the way to the grocery store, or the faces and names of friend and family, or how to walk -- these all happen even without codified rules or explicit teaching, and each has its own character (though learning language and learning culture tend to be closely intertwined).

To the extent it can even be made clearly, any distinction between formal and informal learning is exceedingly coarse grained compared to the mosaics that are actual minds and the intricate subdivisions within each category.  Ironically enough, it's science, putatively cold and reductionist, that has devleoped and provided support for this basic insight.

The pioneer and the dude

The American West, not so long ago in the big picture: Into town rides a dude, that is to say, a city-dweller from the East.  Call him William.  You can spot him a mile away.  He's dressed funny -- a dark suit in the heat of the day, a hat that'll blow off with the first good gust, polished shoes that won't look so good once he steps off his horse.  Which he can't sit on right, anyhow.  Probably won't last a week.

Watching from a distance is an old hand.  Call him Lucky Bill, Lucky because you need to be a bit lucky to have made it this far.  You couldn't necessarily pick him out in a crowd.  In fact, he and his horse look like part of the landscape.  Lucky Bill looks off to the west for half a second.  Weather coming in.  Better get going.  With a low clicking sound and a subtle movement he tells his horse to move.  The horse already knew to go, maybe from a shift in weight, maybe from some other cue.

Lucky's route home takes him right by William.  As they pass, each has one thought of the other: "How ignorant."

Each has a point.  Has Lucky heard of Ovid, or Milton?  Can he even read?  Can he tie a proper Ascot?  Does he even know the name Beau Brummell?  Put him in the middle of any dinner party in New York and he'd be a curiosity at best.

But of course, New York is a long ways away.  We're on Lucky's turf, and here you need to tie a lasso, not a necktie.  Not much use for Milton and Ovid unless they can help keep a herd from getting spooked.  Better to stick to basics, like how to split wood and build a good fire.


In the proper context, neither William is an ignoramus; each is an expert with extensive knowledge gained from years of experience.  Outside that context, however, it's a different story.

Except that Lucky Bill is just William the dude a few years on.  It wasn't easy, and yes, there was a good bit of luck involved, but the raw greenhorn in the funny get-up was quick enough on the uptake to make a go of it.  His hands are calloused now, his face weathered and his locks shaggy.  His mind is a compendium of crucial local knowledge that's saved his life on at least one occasion.  Does he still remember his poets?  Well yes, he does, and he's not the only one in the area.  The local poetry society meets every other Tuesday, rotating through its (four) members' houses.  Weather and such permitting.

How did he get to where he is now?  How much did he have to learn, and how did he learn it?  Did any of his previous knowledge carry over and if so, how?  What did he have to leave by the wayside and why?  Ample room for conjecture here ...