Composition
The song samples the Sister Sledge song "He's the Greatest Dancer" and The Bar-Kays song "Sang and Dance". The line "since I moved up like George and Weezie" is a reference to the TV show The Jeffersons as well as the show's theme song, "Movin' On Up" by Ja'net Dubois. The "mama-uh, mama-uh, mama come closer" line is a reference to the song Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango, specifically the version adapted by Michael Jackson in Wanna Be Startin' Somethin''s final bridge. The connotations associated with the expression getting jiggy were heavily influenced by this single. The term went from being used to acclaim one's fashion or style towards being synonymous with dancing, and eventually back to the original association with sexual connotations. Will Smith has attested in an interview that his inspiration to alter the meaning for the purpose of the song came from his association of the term "jiggy" with "jigaboo", a derogatory term for African-Americans, which made the literal meaning of the title "getting African-American with it" and which was meant to reference the popular folk-myth of an innate sense of rhythm in black folks. The co-opting of a once offensive word also was racially empowering.
The song was also sampled by a Russian pop group Hi-Fi in their 1999 song "Pro Leto" (translated as "About Summer").
Read more about this topic: Gettin' Jiggy Wit It
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)