Broken Wing

Confusing lyrics

One of the biggest trends in the modern world is "hip-hop music." It is bigger than the pet rock, but not quite as big as eating. For people who aren't familiar with rap, it is a person talking with a rhythm over a "beat," which as far as I can tell is a single measure of music and drums, repeated over and over ad nauseum through the whole course of the song. These songs can be very difficult to understand. As the whitest man alive, I often struggle to make sense of lyrics, and sometimes even what the actual words are. Through this struggle, though, I have become a better person. In an effort to have others share the same breakthrough, I will interpret some of the most confusing lyrics in modern hit songs.

• Song: "Sunshine" by Lil' Flip "featuring" Lea
  Confusing lyric: "I'll treat you like milk and spoil ya."
  Meaning: What this means is that Lil' Flip is lactose intolerant. Because of this, he can't drink any of his milk and it always spoils. He is similarly intolerant of "bitches" (Sorry ladies, but in hip-hop that is a technical term). This may seem a roundabout way to express himself, but can you imagine how few records he would sell if that lyric was changed to "I can't eat dairy because it makes me really gassy?" You may be wondering why Lil' Flip bothers buying milk at all if he is lactose intolerant. Well, he is a relatively green rapper. A more experienced rapper would start buying soy milk and then rap "I'll treat you like milk and leave you on the shelf."
• Song: "21 questions" by 50 Cent
  Confusing lyric: "I love you like a fat kid love cake."
  Meaning: Fat kids become fat because they eat waaaay too much cake, as well as potato chips and bacon pie. This is clearly a cry for help from 50 Cent, as he thinks his current relationship is dysfunctional. If it was a good relationship, he would have said, "I love you like a priest doesn't love molesting altar boys." The point is that fat kids are hurt by their love for cake, but it is healthy for priests to not molest others.
• Song: "Public Service Announcement" by Jay-Z
  Confusing lyric: "Shoot at you actors like movie directors."
  Meaning: A lot of people have misinterpreted this lyric as being about gun violence. To do this is to drastically underestimate the subtlety and thought that goes into rap lyrics. You know how when you were that age where you are between being a baby and a small child? You wanted the freedom that comes with not being a baby, but you still wanted the benefits of being a baby, like constant attention and the bottomless cup of milk that was your mother's teat. At some point in this transition, you probably did something immature and one of your parents inevitably said, "You want to act like a baby, I'll treat you like one." Then they put you in you back in your baby crib, put diapers on you, put a pacifier in your mouth, made you eat baby food, then took pictures of all this and hung them up in your high school. This is sort of what Jay-Z is doing here. He's saying, "Fine, you want to be an actor, I'll treat you like an actor. I'll film you using expensive cameras and one of those phallic microphones and I'll make you say the same thing over and over and then when we're done I'll edit it down to two hours and show it on a big screen. Is that what you want, actor?" Since he is a professional writer, he was able to do it much more concisely than I did.

Posted by mill1991 at November 17, 2004 9:50 PM | TrackBack