Here He Goes Again Look at All the Swagger Around Him
Jay-Z performs during his Magna Carter globe tour this by Jan. Owen Sweeney/AP hide caption
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Owen Sweeney/AP
Jay-Z performs during his Magna Carter world bout this past January.
Owen Sweeney/AP
"No 1 on the corner has swagga like us," sang rapper M.I.A. in her global hit "Paper Planes." The song was afterward sampled by T.I. and Jay Z in their hit song "Swagga Similar United states of america." A few years before that, it was Jay-Z who declared "I judge I got my swagger dorsum" on his 2001 album The Design.
The word swagger should exist a familiar term to anyone who has listened to popular hip-hop songs in recent years; a contempo search on Rap Genius turned up more than a 1000 songs that used the discussion in the lyrics.
Given those stats, you lot'd be forgiven for thinking "swagger" is a relatively new concept, but information technology tin be traced all the way dorsum to Elizabethan England. As with so many other famous words and phrases, the first writer to use it was William Shakespeare. The playwright offset had the "shrewd and knavish sprite" Puck use it in this monologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream:
What hempen habitation-spuns have we swaggering here,
So most the cradle of the fairy queen?
While in that location is a tiny hint in this usage that swagger is closely related to braggadocio and pride, it wasn't until Henry IV, Part 2 that the meaning was really driven home by the bard. It's in that play that the London innkeeper Mistress Quickly gives this speech almost one of the overly aggressive and frontward men who frequent her tavern:
If he swagger, let him not come here: no, by my
organized religion; I must live among my neighbours; I'll no
swaggerers: I am in good proper name and fame with the
very best: shut the door; in that location comes no swaggerers
here: I accept non lived all this while, to have
swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.
It'south articulate from this passage that swagger has two meanings — one that refers to drunken behavior, and another, more familiar ane that denotes arrogance and (in the eyes of people similar Mistress Quickly) an outsized sense of self-worth.
Audio familiar?
Jonathan Swift would also option upward this usage more than a century afterward, in 1726, with Gulliver'south Travels, when he wrote that the Queen'due south Dwarf "would e'er bear upon to swagger and look big equally he passed past me in the Queen's Antechamber ... and he seldom failed of a small Discussion or ii upon my Littleness."
While the definition of the discussion would go on its judgmental connotations during the 1800s, in his 1865 dictionary, British etymologist Hensleigh Wedgwood defined the give-and-take in poetic terms, writing that it was "the idea of tremulous motility, swaying backwards and forwards ... commonly expressed by forms originally representing the sound made by the dashing of water."
By the 1870s, the discussion would take on the definition we know today — that is, equally this 1872 dictionary puts information technology, "to boast or brag noisily." (Cultural critics accept been declaring that "swagger" has been on the refuse since at least 1892. A piece in the mag Science that yr chosen swagger "[t]he most obvious and disagreeable form of cocky-assertion, which consists of making other people conscious of their inferiority ... ")
Just swagger, fittingly, was and is persistent. Definitions like the ane in that 1892 article testify how "swagger" was in many ways a natural fit for the hip-hop of the past ii decades. According to Slate, the very kickoff hip-hop artists to employ "swagger" in a song were the group Brand Nubian in their 1990 vocal "Dull Down," where they note someone "used to walk with a swagger, now y'all simply stagger."
"Slow Down" would start a lyrical trend. Equally Ben Gabriel wrote in The New Enquiry three years agone:
Swagger is not new to hip-hop merely has always been outside to it. It recalls '70s rockers, '20s gangsters, pirates and Shakespearean vagabonds. The connotations are all, ane might say, very white. Just it is a very particular kind of whiteness — one which is very enlightened of itself and makes an explicit performance of its own economic or legal disenfranchisement.
Since then, the evolution of swagger has continued, and the word has been shortened to only "swag" in contempo years.
Apparently it's truthful, equally Jay Z raps in "Otis," that the hip-hog mogul invented "swag."
Just the award for the most free and random employ of "swag" goes to rapper Souljah Boy in his song about Joseph Kony, leader of the guerrilla Lord's Resistance Regular army in Uganda, "Stop Kony":
End Kony
What practise you think we should do about information technology?
Nosotros should stop him
Nosotros should terminate who?
Him.
It's obvious that Kony should be stoppped.
The problem is that 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is.
Swag.
If they knew, Kony would have been stopped long ago.
Swag.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/17/290857087/what-do-jay-z-and-shakesepeare-have-in-common-swagger