Friday, April 23, 2004

I Am The Whitest Man Alive

This may be my most embarrassing post ever... but I think everyone could figure out I'm white (as in Caucasian). Well, I am prefacing this post by saying I am basically a poster child for a white guy (at least a suburban white guy)... meaning I'm as white as Wonder Bread (like so white I'm transparent), but that I still like a lot of things from Black culture, the most recognizable being rap music, which, to a certain extent, I do like.

Anyway, I was watching the new Chris Rock special on HBO with my wife a couple days ago, and he was talking about the song "Get Low" by Lil' John, and how it is a song that makes rap music hard to defend. Now, like most people, I've heard this song about 10 Bazillion times on the local Top 40 station, but unfortunately had a very misguided interpretation of the lyrics. The following is a transcription of a typical attempt by me and my wife to sing along with the chorus (if you're less white then me, and could figure the lyrics out right away, then please refrain from laughing so much that you can't read this post 'cause you are blinded by the tears streaming down your face), Ahem:

To the window! To the Wah! (shut up, I know, I know)
Til' the sweat drip down the bah! (I said shut up)
To the bah skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet, OH skeet skeet skeet skeet (ironically, I got skeet right... but had no fucking clue what it meant... so I just assumed I was wrong about this lyric, but was happy in my ignorance).

So anyway, we were watching Chris Rock, and he informed us that in fact the lyrics were:

To the window! (Ha! I was right) To the wall! (OK, not really close, but not bad for my white ear)
Til' the sweat drips down my balls (WTF!!!, OK, I can hardly be blamed for not getting this right... you see, I use the more colloquial "nuts" when referring to testicles, and I was a little shocked to learn that a rap artist would use "balls," which seams very 3rd grade to me)
Oh skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet, OH skeet skeet skeet skeet (WTF again! you mean I was pretty much right about the skeet?!? Could he be talking about skeet shooting? Does Lil' John have a deep seated hatred for clay pigeons?)

At which point Chris Rock repeated skeet about 600 times, which made the audience (mostly black and less white folks than me) go crazy... which led me to believe my whiteness was making me miss out on a joke. So, super nerd that I am, I had to look it up on the internet. And I'm happy to say, I now know what "skeet" means in the rap vernacular (although I am too bashful to just post it)... which of course means that either the definition will change, or "skeet" will be replaced by a different word, because the whitest MF1 in the world2 cannot be up on the lingo.


1What are you looking at the footnote for? You know what a MF is
2That's me

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