Maybe there's Something to Swizz Flying Away on a Unicorn

Despite having engaged in multiple debates about The Verve Pipe's "The Freshmen" meaning, its Wikipedia entry still leaves me unsure. I also thought Kanye West's "Heard 'Em Say" was brilliant until I realized the lyrics:

Can I at least get a raise on a minimum wage?

And I know the government administered AIDS

were a conspiracy theory, rather than a commentary on the welfare system. My point is that I have a track record of egregiously misinterpreting lyrics. Cases in point:

Lil Wayne's verse to "Viva La White Girl" has been out around two months, and the original's been out for over a year, but I've only been listening to both for about a day and six months, respectively. Excuses, excuses, right? When WayneWeezy comes in with:

As the white stallion bucks
And kicks me in my nose
Until my face busts

I thought, "Oh, cute, he turned a song about Travis McCoy's white girl-fetish into a song about cocaine." Then McCoy's lyrics came in and I guess I really heard them for the first time:

We all lust/to the glamorous
White girl/so fine.
Going up /on the downtown line.
Take your razor/ break down my line.
Put your nose to the speaker/Now breathe in

Since I've been dismissive of both Kanye's "Crack Music" and USDA's "White Girl"[1] in the past, I'm ashamed this snuck past me when it's just the two concepts stuck together.

As much as I can blame the referentiality of rap for that misunderstanding, when it comes to Kanye's "Homecoming," I've got nobody to blame but myself. It's essentially a remix of a song he did with John Legend called "Home," and I've been listening to that one for over 3 years now.[2] The thing is, I had always heard the line:

My name is Windy [aka the Windy City] and I like to blow trees
as
My name is WENDY and I like to blow trees

so I thought it was about how Kanye misses some woman he knew before he hit it big.

What makes this all really sad is that Kanye spells it out:

If you don't know by now
I'm talking 'bout Chi-Town

but I just took to that to mean that Wendy lived in Chicago. The good part about knowing it's all about a city is that I'm a lot less disturbed by the knowledge he was taught to go downtown by some woman he met at 3.[3]

[1]Its Rick Ross/Fab/Weezy remix, however, is endlessly endearing, both because of and in spite of the triplicate Lindsay Lohan references.
[2]You'll note the song supposedly came out in '02. Look, I'm slow on the uptake. I'm probably missing Kanye tracks left and right because I pretty much rely on someone updating his discography Wikipedia entry to find new ones. Where's "Good Night"? "Young Folks"?
[3]How is Memoirs of a Geisha not universally accepted as creepy?