I’m still mulling over our big week in politics, with Jon Stewart’s rally and the rather less enjoyable elections that followed, and I’ll dig into those in video form this week. I’ve also (probably) got some news coming about my radio show. But first, we need to deal with a more pressing issue: the transcription of rap lyrics.
Last week Slate posted an article about Yale’s new Anthology of Rap, blasting it for allegedly being “rife with transcription errors”. Naturally I took this as an invitation to get my nerd on, and see how many mistakes I could find. So I picked up a copy this weekend and skimmed through, sticking with songs I know and remember well.
The value and import of treating rap as poetry have always been hotly debated by fans, and I’m generally in the “hip-hop is already hip-hop, who cares if it’s poetry” camp. But I have to admit this book is lots of fun to read while listening along with the music, and I’m not sure “rife with errors” is a fair estimation. These transcriptions get a lot of tricky things right, and are a few steps above what is currently available online.
THAT BEING SAID……yes, I think I see some other mistakes. Here are 14 of them:
1. For ODB’s “Brooklyn Zoo” (page 545) the book says: “Energy building, taking all types of medicine.” This is a common mistake but any hip-hopper of a certain age, who grew up in NYC, will know the correct lyric is:
“In a G Building, taking all types of medicine”
-a reference to the psychiatric ward of King’s County hospital in Brooklyn. EDIT: this correction was just confirmed for me by the illustrious Sophia Chang, who verified it with the Gza today.
2. For Lauryn Hill’s “Final Hour” (page 415) the book says: “Word to Boonie, I makes a lot like a Sunni,” which wouldn’t make much sense. I’m fairly certain the correct lyric is a reference to the formal Muslim prayer that Sunnis perform 5 times a day:
“I make Salah like a Sunni”
3. And another little nitpick from the same song: the book says “Had opportunity, went from ‘hood-shock to ‘hood-chic”, but that should be identified as Hoodshock, the name of the music festival Lauryn helped organize in 1996.
4. At the end of “I’m Bad” (page 217), the book has LL Cool J telling the cops: “Gimme that, boy. Get Funky!” But of course what he actually says is:
“Gimme that walkie-talkie!”
5. For my favorite Ice Cube track, “Bird in the Hand” (page 424), the book says “And you’re playing against the ghetto black fly,” which again doesn’t really make sense. I’m pretty sure the correct lyric, which is a pivotal line in the song, is:
“And your plan against the ghetto backfired”
These next few are minor quibbles:
6. On Lil Kim’s “Queen Bitch” (page 449), the book says “Roll with the niggas that be thuggin, buggin in the tunnel in Eso’s,” but it should read as “..in The Tunnel and Esso’s“, referencing two of NYC’s big hip-hop clubs at the time.
7. On Biggie’s “One More Chance (Remix)” (page 476), the book says “As I lay down law like Island Carpet,” but I’ve always taken that line as a reference to the longtime local outlet “Allen Carpet”. Can any fellow New Yorkers corroborate this one?
8. On the Fugees “Fu-Gee-La” (Page 398) the book has Lauryn saying “take no shorts like poon-poon’s.” But out of respect for the hallowed tradition of poom-poom shorts I think this should read as “poom-pooms” or “pum-pums”.
9. On “Wrath of Kane” (page 139), Big Daddy Kane is quoted as saying “Destroying negativity and suckers that come with/the weak, the wack, the words, the poor.” But “the words” doesn’t fit at all with the rest of that line, and I’ve always heard it as either A) “the worse,” or more likely B) “the worst” with the S and T muddled together a bit in his delivery. (A small nitpick but I’ll take any excuse to post this track)
And last but not least, on Lady of Rage’s “Unfuckwitable” I saw at least 5 questionable lines:
10 The book has Rage saying “I’m folding MCs like Times with dirty consonents and vowels.” Much as I like the idea of Rage explaining the proper way to read the NY Times, though, I’m afraid the correct lyric is
“I’m folding MCs like towels with dirty consonents and vowels”
11. Earlier on it quotes Rage saying “I rock the home of the fucking atlas,” which should read:
“I rock the whole motherfucking atlas”
12. Then on the very next line, the book says “”Save that racket for the tennis court and uh, brought your mission” which I’m pretty sure ought to be:
“Save that racket for the tennis court and abort your mission”
13. Later on it has Rage saying “Make em tremble when I spit through the dental of these instrumentals,” which I’m pretty sure ought to read as:
“Make em tremble when I spit through the dental on these instrumentals”
14. And a bit later in the same rhyme scheme the book says “I told y’all from the get-go I rock harder than credentials” which once again makes no sense. The correct lyric is a reference to the insurance company also known as “The Rock”:
“I told y’all from the get-go I rock harder than Prudential” .
So what have we learned here? Well it seems pretty clear that A) I have no life, and B) Yale’s Anthology of Rap has a few more errors than it ought to. It would also greatly benefit from fleshing itself out with footnotes. But again, I do think it’d be an enjoyable read for any fan and I don’t mean to knock it wholesale.
As one of the undergrads who helped Adam Bradley with the transcriptions, I’d like to personally apologize for some of the errors in the book, although fortunately I didn’t do any of the songs in this post haha. He’s working on a revised classroom addition though, and would probably welcome any other corrections you find.
Any idea whether or not the mistakes suggest lyrics were lifted wholesale from the Original Hip Hop Lyric Archive website, as some Amazon reviewers claim?
Transcription errors happen, but transcribing someone else’s errors is just plain thievery…unless, I guess, you edit Cooks Source?
@Julian Padgett: I’m not surprised there are errors in transcription if you can’t distinguish between an ‘edition’ and an ‘addition’!
@Jeremy — took the words out of my mouth. Is that where undergrad education is at these days?
I was at Hoodshock. Thanks for reminding me that even existed.
I remember the stampede and the chaos. I wonder if there is any good video from that event.
“Transcription errors happen, but transcribing someone else’s errors is just plain thievery…unless, I guess, you edit Cooks Source?”
Supreme Court actually ruled in the late 1980s this isn’t thievery, just research:
http://openjurist.org/827/f2d/569/worth-v-selchow-and-righter-company
@Jay Yes to “Allen Carpet” (from a Native New Yorker). Thanks for the “G Building” I’m gonna go correct it in my screen scraped searchable lyrics database now.
@Laurel Don’t the Rap Artists still own their community transcribed lyrics? Long live Open Source :-\
@Kathryn & Jeremy LMAO. Give @Julian a break. He came clean. Could’ve been a spell check error.
I didn’t have the patience to check them all, but the ones I did (LL Cool J, ODB) come straight from OHHLA.
It might not be illegal, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t unethical to take others’ work and claim it as their own.
Ok… turns out I had the patience after all.
The Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim,l and BDK errors are also lifted from OHHLA. The “Fugee-La” listing has the same line even more wrong (they say “like poon poon’s”), so it’s possible the Anthology editors tried to correct this one, and only just fell a little short.
I couldn’t find the Lady of Rage song on OHHLA, but I googled them, and the first result that came up (smartlyrics.com) has all of these errors.
Hey Jay,
That Biggie line is Allen Carpet. I always loved that reference cause it so old school New York.
Yeah Werner, since they apparently had a group of students doing the grunt work of transcribing, I’m guessing the method varied from student to student.. some took the OHHLA version as a starting point and tried to revise/improve it, some just googled and did the same with another of the million lyric sites, and some did a pure take from scratch..
Rap nerds unite!
The transcription method was prescribed for everyone by professor Bradley, everyone being maybe two students, him and the other editor. Excuse me for one spelling error, I’ve been up writing papers four nights in a row. But it’s OK, I’m sure you all can forgive, we all make typos late at night
Ah thanks for coming back Julian, I envisioned it being a larger group than that. I don’t cosign judging people for spelling errors in a blog comment, BTW.
Can you give any more insight on the process/method, were you expected to start from scratch as opposed to referring to existing online documents as a starting point? Was using OHHLA (or other other lyric sites) as a source discouraged/encouraged/not addressed either way?
Tahero, Dave, I stand corrected. Thank you.
Julian, no offense intended.
Yeah, we were encouraged to find online lyrics and correct their errors as we formatted the line breaks to coincide with the measures of the track’s beat. Sometimes there wasn’t any option but to start from scratch though. Jean Grae’s lyrics, for example, usually didn’t have any online lyrics to use as a starting point.
Hey Jay
Like “In A G Building” like you, as a native NYer I’m sure it was “Allen Carpet”
Never mind that — what about the glaring omissions? No Coup? No Paris!?
Actually, I emailed Dr. Bradley and he said they tried, but couldn’t get the rights to reprint ‘em. At least Chuck D gave Paris some love in his afterword.
I think it’s a great book and I’ll be using it plenty in my classroom.
these lyric sites are notoriously shoddy. It’s a little shocking that they were used at all. Maybe not.
ya, those online lyrics sites are a joke. i can imagine it being a timesaver to have a starting template though. and OF COURSE theyre making another edition. thats how all these textbook/academic publishing companies get you, a new “updated” and “corrected” version every year
You know if you were a student at Yale and you took 95% of your content from one or two internet sources and didn’t credit them, you’d be in front of the academic review board explaining how your parents would freak if you got suspended. And now you’ve got the professors doing it (and encouraging their students to do it) in a book they’re commercially profiting from. In their huge intro where they labor on about how they painstakingly chose the songs, contacted the artists, formed their special “blogger review committee” etc etc… they couldn’t devote one sentence to credit the people who did 95% of the books’ work for them?
As a native New Yorker born in 1979, I should be able to get most references made by guys like Biggie, Nas, the Wu members, etc.
But it shows you how fragmented slang is — a name-drop that’s dope to people in Brooklyn and Queens might not make any sense to someone who’s from the Bronx. I get the vast majority of them, but if it’s difficult for me, then it’s certainly difficult for a bunch of kids who were born in 1990 and may have never been to New York.
That said, Werner’s right. This is bush league stuff on the part of the professors. How can you tell students not to rip from the internet when internet lyric sites are your main “research” tool.
And maybe this is just because I worked in journalism, but it seems incredibly lazy to me that they could not pick up the phone, call the record labels, and get some of the artists to look at the lyrics and confirm/correct. If I was an emcee and dozens of lyrics sites, plus a book, bungled my carefully-constructed rhymes, I’d want to set the record straight.
They tried to contact ALL of the artists who are still alive. If you look in the book it lists which ones responded and corrected the transcriptions. Also, I’d like to state again that online lyrics are a starting point, not the main research tool. The main research tool is the song itself.
It’s “In the G Building…” not “In a G Building…” He referenced THE G Building numerous times, including during a legendary appearance on “Yo MTV Raps.” Of course there are likely dozens of G Buildings in New York, but ODB was referring to a specific place.
Marv: I changed it to “in a G Building” because that’s the wording that was passed on to me by the GZA.
Keeping in mind that transcription errors occur all the time, I none-the –less found this large number of errors really problematic and maybe even offensive; after all the people putting this work together specialize in close readings and footnoting. The very fact that this compilation did not have foot notes strikes me as them not actually taking rap and hip hop very seriously as poetry even as they claim that is their project. A serious scholarly edition of a poet will almost always include footnotes, especially with works that include references to popular culture or make use of slang. Everyone seems pretty chill about all these mistakes but to me they seem to indicate something more serious. The underlying and no doubt unintentional message of this volume essentially seems to say that rap is easy all you need is the words on the page, with no need for any more explication. Which is think is a really problematic message, just because rap and hip hop are accessible and popular forms of poetry doesn’t mean they don’t have the many layers of meaning that are only got to if you have correct transcription on the page, after all if Keats famous line was transcribed as ‘Beauty is truth, truth booty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” it does compromise any attempt to do a close and serious reading of the poem.
@Dallas: Rap nerds unite indeed!
@Julian Padgett: Was there any discussion of trying to textually communicate some of the elements of flow, mainly the rapper’s control of which words are stressed?
I’m looking forward to eventually get my hands on this book, and also curious and a bit leery of hiphop’s path towards institutionalization (which it’s been traveling for awhile, I guess). I always wonder if, like much jazz, that’s a sign that the trailbreaking days are coming to a close. Also, I wonder with excitement “what’s next?”
After reading this I found myself actually wanting to read the book. But after a little thought it discouraged me, agreeing with lisa, this bothers me. I’d like to see a genuine attempt at this in the future, I hope it happens. Also not being from NY I would have missed a lot of the localized jargon but I got “Allen Carpet’s” dont ask me how i knew that back in the day but I did.
No footnotes, no real efforts to contact the artists, and no matter if they listened to the songs or used the internet, there are just some references that won’t translate unless you’re from that area or time period.
To put this book on sale with the “Yale” name on it fools professors and other educators into using a faulty source and spreading the mistakes made. Just because it says “Yale” on it, means people will take it as Gods word.
As a fun project that you publish free, it might be cool… but for sale, it’s exploitation.
Tastykeish, no one is being exploited. An anthology is more than a collection of works. It gives the readers context and support for understanding how and why the work was created. It is meant as a pedagogical tool for teachers who want to address rap as a poetic art form. While I have a personal stake in the matter having known and taken classes from Adam Bradley, one of the editors of the book, I know the best efforts where made to make this an accurate and useable document.
The G building in kings County hospital most likely. that’s a well know place
to all of the BK natives.
Lauryn Hill’s line is actually a pun . I makes a lot / I make salat . Get it ?
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