The Coasters: “Yakety Yak, Don’t Talk Back”

Remember hearing this song and always singing along, “Yakety Yak, Don’t Talk Back?”…

“Yakety Yak” is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic 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. This song was one of a string of singles released by The Coasters between 1957 and 1959 that dominated the charts, one of the biggest performing acts of the rock and roll era.

The song is a “playlet,” a word Stoller used for the glimpses into teenage life that characterized the songs Leiber and Stoller wrote and produced. 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.

The threatened punishment for not taking out the garbage and sweeping the floor is, in the song’s humorous lyrics:

ALSO READ: SHOW BIZ PAIRINGS THAT CALLED IT QUITS