Yo’ Mama
Quite a lot of discussion on where ‘Diss’ songs originate over on Boing-Boing, where I note attributions being corrected to Old Norse, the Romans, etc. But surely if we’re tracing the line back from rap, yes, we’ll go through the dozens, but rather than Vikings or Catullus or other European white folk, we ought to find our way back to the griot tradition, a sort of poet laureate role employed by any person of status among a wide array of African societies in which the singer composes and performs paens to the worthy person, citing their family history and its significance. Because this is an oral tradition, there’d be no records of ancient practices, but it seems pretty obvious that there’d be an ancillary tradition of taking the mickey, too, both in a spirit of just plain fun but also as a more spiteful practice for when someone’s failed to pay the negotiated fee and so forth. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it. In fact, I’d say the Romans got it from the Egyptians who got it from the sub-Saharan Africans, and the Vikings got it from the Romans, and so on. But these chains of causation are really pretty tenuous, since I'm sure many different strands of oral history have also developed satirical versions of themselves. Who wouldn't want to make fun of the king? It even works today.