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Crowdsourcing Kanye & The Semiotics of So Me

When the music video for Kanye West's "Good Life" premiered in September something immediately bothered me.[1] I knew the lyrics sounded like:

'Cause I'm seasoned/Haters give me them salty looks/Law-rees

Although I didn't know what in the world a "law-ree" was, I took the aside in stride, since I'd inferred the main seasoned/salty pun.

Then the video directors Jonas & François decided to have Mr West speak the word "law-ree" in a word balloon, and I learned it was actually "Lawry's." I imagined Googling it was a worth a shot, but I couldn't figure out the connection. Considering it may be some regional Chicago-slang from Ye's youth, I asked my coworkers who went to school in Chicago, and they were at a complete loss. Even my last-resort UrbanDictionary[2] gave me nothing.

Fast forward to last night. Lost Remote had a post linking to the MTV Labs Blog, which I had no idea existed. I poked around a bit, found out MTV had developed a lyrics site, and tested it out by looking up the "official" lyrics to 'Good Life' That site listed "lowry's" as the correct word, so I chalked the in-video spelling up to Jonas & François's Frenchness and set a-Googling.

Google suggested I might mean "Lawry's" as in, the birthplace of Lawry's seasoned salt.

...

I don't know how I didn't notice that, but I will note that no decent UrbanDictionary explanation came out until October, a few days after Lawry's Wikipedia entry was edited to mention "Good Life." Hopefully we can all learn from this process that:
α) Crowds can be wise, but doesn't mean they're not slow
β) MTV's lyrics site is less helpful than a Google search
γ) Kanye can be pretty corny[3]

[1] Surprisingly, it's not the fact that the video vixen/item girl's name is "Fershgenet Melaku." Personally, I find that no less appealing a name than "Esther Baxter."
[2] If you need UrbanDictionary to figure out songs, you are a cultural tourist. Frankly, I'm not ready to count myself out of being up on the Louis Vuitton Don yet.
[3] After the 'Graduation' leak dropped, I went around lording over my less-piracy-inclined colleagues by quizzing them on lyrics. My favorite question was, "Tom Breihan thinks the line 'I'm like a fly Malcolm X/Buy any jeans necessary' is corny. What do you think?" What surprised me is the number of people who didn't get the reference, and when I explained it to them, they were inevitably unimpressed. Long story short: even good jokes aren't funny after you explain them.

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?

Kanye @ the Epicensor

Back in pre-'Late Registration' 2005, Kanye West almost-apologized for using "the n-word" — henceforth "neighbor,"[1] because I feel stupid typing "the n-word" — in his music by arguing that not using it when dialect so demands just distracts from his message. Yet, judging from the video for (ironically enough) "Can't Tell Me Nothin'," he's capitulated to the current angst over the word "ho." Specifically his third verse has the lines:

How he move in room full of nos
How he stay faithful in a room full of hoes?

Except you won't hear the "hoes" in the official video@≈-1:46[2].

What's really interesting to me is, @≈-0:27 you can hear "neighbor" said very clearly by Young Jeezy.[3] So, basically, Kanye was willing to put the 'neighbor' on the internet and on iTunes (for Free Ninety Nine), but balked at "ho"? I'm too shocked to really evaluate this decision, and what it says about the apparently zero-sum game that is Women v Black People.

What's really meta-interesting to me is: I was going to mention this last week but I couldn't find time, and had sort of assumed somebody else would. I actually came to the ol' blogspot to write something on the pomp-pomo-sity of Kanye sampling a Daft Punk song that was sampling Edward Birdsong, but I was beaten by over a week and nevertheless still felt the urge to write. Luckily, it turns out that nobody else seems as obsessed with music self-censorship as I.[4] No doubt this is derived from my adolescent affection for DMX's ad libs, but that's a story for another time. A proper grad student would actually want to expound[5] on any of these points, but that's because proper grad students write theses.

[1] How did I manage to never write a paper on Lisa Lampanelli?
[2] The mixtape version proves "hos" is indeed the censored word. Also, when will Google add its link-within-a-video feature to YouTube?
[3] Jeezy/T.I./DJ Toomp's "I Got Money" may or may not be the sample upon which "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" is based, which would open the shortest song-to-sample window I've seen since Kanye sampled Alicia Keys's "If Ain't Got You" in order to remix it. How I love recursive loops.
[4] See, again, my Foucauldian analysis of 'I Wanna [Fsck] You.'
[5] To think, had I written this when the blog-iron was hot, I could have beaten Breihan (chronologically, of course — never content-wise)

Love as Parable for Pot (NOT the Other Way Around)

We've all heard songs that speak about relationships through metaphors, be they food, vehicles, precipitation, or soda & soap [1]. I'm more interested in when the referentiality is flipped and love is a stand-in for something else. There's this joke that if you switch "girl" for G-d, then all of a sudden a Christian song sounds exactly like a secular ballad. Rap runs rampant with artists loving music as a person. Apparently it's all the rage nowadays to compare cocaine to Caucasians.

Mostly, I'm interested in weed.

The most famous marijuana-metaphor song is undoubtedly "Mary Jane" by Rick James.[2] James is being pretty obvious with that song, however, what with the titular pun. I prefer it when artists are crafty.

Jaheim's Styles P collaboration "Fiend" is a pretty good example of this, and what really attuned me to the possibility of sticky-icky songs. I had to listen intently a couple times before deciding if lyrics like She gets me all chocked up /I can barely catch my breath /Don't want to pass her around /I keep her to myself was about a woman or some spliff. Maybe I'm just slow?

Upon the first listen of Lloyd's "Hazel," however, I knew it was about great ganja. Ya got my eyes so low/And they damn near closed was a dead giveaway — if only because I learned from "Fiend"[3]— and once Lloyd started talking about Hazel's purple highlights I was cracking up.

Fidelity is a somewhat disturbing theme in all of these songs. "Mary Jane" likes to spread her love, although Jaheim warns All of my dogs wanna hit her/Right after I'm with her, Styles P lets the team take a stab at her, and Lloyd admits usually I'd share you. Now this is all well and good if we're talking about bud, but if you read the lyrics solely by their denotation, you end up with a patriarchal polyamor of the worst kind. The mere fact that it is so easy to express the consumption of cannabis in terms of dating suggests something twisted about the state of modern relationships.

Although Lloyd, Styles, Jaheim, and James all laud la cucaracha for lifting them up, what do they give her in return? Lloyd is the only one who offers to prove his affection, but in saying he loves Hazel so much he'd scrape the guts out a dutch for her leaves us with this weird Goofy/Pluto image of some anthropomorphic THC blazing a blunt. Granted, burn one tree and there's still the forest, but that leads to a big Kantian question about abstract conceptions like Hazel versus intuition of a high/woman and I'm pretty tired as is.[4]

[1] "Soda and Soap" might be better considered a foo-as-metaphor-for-anything track in the vein of "Taxi Driver," or Kanye's verse on "Hold On," but it was the only thing I could think of that didn't involve R Kelly A.K.A. the real monster of the double-entendre. Okay, I'm going to stop before I get trapped in a recursive loop of indexicality.
[2] Wikipedia claims that "Purple Haze" is actually the eponym for weed, and not a reference to it. Of course, Wikipedia ain't exactly the pope.
[3] Also Chingy, or possibly 欧阳靖. Wow, I can't believe Chingy got away with that.
[4] Just want to point out that I'm tired and not high. I mean, I don't even drink caffeine.