Michael Jackson's Nonsense Chant at: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/blogexcerpts/1902/
Yesterday, Ben Zimmer traced <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1542>the nonsense-syllable chant at the end of Michael Jackson's *Wanna Be Startin Somethin* back to its roots in Manu Dibango's *Soul Makossa*, a 1973 Cameroonian hit that played a role in the origins of disco in New York City. The chants in these songs are nice examples of a phenomenon that I discussed a couple of years ago ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?<http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/005154.html>", 11/26/2007), where linguistic accents and musical beats start off aligned at the beginning of a phrase, and then go out of sync, typically with one or more of the later textual accents shifted "to the left", i.e. ahead in time, relative to the apparent musical beat. ++++++++++++++++++++ Madhav, please take a look at it. ++++++++++++++++++++ venantius