Patent Leather Daddy

[T]he SNAP! contains a multiplicity of coded meanings: as in—SNAP!—"Got your point!" Or—SNAP!—"Don't even try it." Or—SNAP!—"You fierce!" Or—SNAP!—"Get out of my face." Or—SNAP!—"Girlfriend, pleeeease." The snap can be as emotionally and politically charged as a clenched fist, can punctuate debate and dialogue like an exclamation point, a comma, an ellipse, or altogether negate the need for words among those who are adept at decoding its nuanced meanings.

But the particular appropriation of the snap by Hollywood's Black Pack deflates the gesture into rank caricature. Instead of a symbol of communal expression and, at times, cultural defiance, the snap becomes part of a simplistically reductive Negro faggot indentity: It functions as a mere signpost of effeminate, cute, comic homosexuality.

—from Marlon Riggs's "Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a SNAP! Queen" [download PDF]

Nearly twenty years later, the SNAP! has echoed across the mainstream, and depending on who's snapping and who's being snapped at, its meanings are referential, reverential, lampooned, interpolated, ignored, or any combination thereof:

dont make me snap my fingers in a z formation.
exclamation!
flip my hair;
snap my wrist.
listen girl,
u just got DISSED

"...or whatever."

Download:

• Snap! - Cult of Snap [World Power Mix]
• Snap! - See the Light [2.8 T-Boy Club Remix]
• Snap! - The Power [Mischa Daniël's Crazy Head Mix]
• Snap! - Rhythm Is a Dancer [Tee's Choice Mix]
• Snap! - Rhythm Is a Dancer [Rhyth Kid Version]