Juju

Hello, you have a way with the words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Doug from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hello, Doug. Welcome to the program.

Nice to be talking with you.

So I have a question about the word juju.

Juju.

Juju, and it’s been used in the context of bad juju or funky juju or got into some juju.

And it’s something I’d never heard until recently, and I’ve heard it in a couple different circumstances, within really just a few weeks.

Well, I hope everything’s okay.

If you have a lot of bad juju, I’m worried about you.

Well, it wasn’t referring to me, fortunately, I guess.

It sounds like a bad thing if it’s funky and it’s bad.

But I’m curious as to why it’s coming up now and where it came from.

Well, a question for you, Doug. Was this from friends of yours?

Yeah, a couple friends, one of whom is also a musical colleague.

And go ahead.

And I’m wondering, were they around in the 1960s?

Yes.

Yeah, one of them would have been quite young then.

One of them would have been probably a 20-year-old.

I ask because bad juju really took off in the United States in the 1960s, but it’s been around for a long period of time.

And it apparently goes back to an African word for either a charm or magical object that’s used in casting a kind of spell, something like a monkey’s paw or an animal’s skull.

And juju can also refer to the supernatural power itself.

We heard it discussed during the World Cup.

Do you remember this?

Oh, did we?

There were some people who were accused of doing juju for some of the African national sports teams.

Did it work?

Maybe.

I don’t think so.

The sort of magical part works, makes sense in terms of the friend who brought it up.

She’s involved in sort of spiritual clearing, energetic healing, and she was talking about creating a spray, I think that sort of air freshener, except to clear away bad vibes or bad energy in a space.

And she sort of laughingly said that they were looking for a name, and I think, if I recall, she came up with Funky Juju Be Gone and said, well, that said something like that, something everyone would know.

Everyone knows what that is.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had no idea what she was talking about.

But she’s a West Coast gal.

That explains a lot.

And then the next person who brought it up was an older, mid-60s jazz musician from St. Louis who was referring to someone having gotten into some bad juju.

And so having a West Coast sort of spiritualist and then a St. Louis jazz musician all referring to this thing that I had no knowledge of here in Madison, Wisconsin, made me think I was out of the loop.

What made it popular in the 60s?

I’m not really sure, except maybe it was exotic sounding.

And there was a rise in the Back to Africa movement and African-Americans kind of reconnecting with some of the religion and culture of the African continent.

And since that’s where the word ultimately comes from, maybe that kind of gave it a resurgence of popularity.

And juju is also slang for marijuana, but I think that’s a different kind of juju.

Yeah, unrelated word.

So it depends on what kind of bad juju they got into.

We almost never talk about good juju, do we?

No, we don’t, but there is such a thing for healing.

It’s like a bad drug trip.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I’ve been asking friends about it, and someone just yesterday brought up some sort of movie theater candy jujube.

Jujube.

Also unrelated.

Yeah.

Also unrelated.

Not related at all.

No, not at all.

Though if you got into some bad jujubes, that would probably not be a good thing either.

Or you might get into them if you’d had some juju to smoke.

But anyway.

Well, Doug, I think your friend’s product has a future.

I’ll be looking for it.

Funky jujubee gone.

Hey, Doug, thanks for calling.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, noodling around here as I want to do.

Yes, you are want to do.

The term dates at least to the mid-early 1940s.

Juju?

Yeah, when it shows up in English, but of course in the African languages it goes back much further than that.

And it exists in a wide variety of African languages.

Yes, yes, especially on the west coast of Africa.

So juju, good stuff.

Is that the opposite of mojo?

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe, at least in English.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.