[Lyric] Lady Mondegreen and the Miracle of Misheard Song Lyrics (Willy Staley)

Long before the Internet came along and ruined our ability to experience anything and simply enjoy it, Gary Larson drew a “Far Side” cartoon of a cow staring blankly at a table, upon which is a set of poorly made, nonsensical tools. The cow’s brow appears furrowed, as if it is unable to decide which one to use. The caption reads simply: “Cow Tools.” Larson’s logic behind the gag was this: How hideous and apparently useless would a cow’s tool set be?

Unfortunately for Larson, one of the tools vaguely resembled a saw, causing confused readers to seek out human analogs in the rest of the tool set in order to decipher the gag. Predictably this misreading led to frustration and a subsequent outpouring of angry reader mail. According to Larson’s “Prehistory of the Far Side,” it is arguably the most loathed “Far Side” strip ever, which says a lot: the comic was often intentionally obtuse

A recent rap lyric has elicited a cow-tools-esque reaction on the Internet. To be precise, though, we should call it a mondegreen: the term for misheard song lyrics that give rise to new words or meanings. Sylvia Wright coined the term in an essay for Harper’s in 1954, recounting a frequent mishearing of a lyric from “The Bonny Earl O’Moray” that she experienced as a child: “Laid him on the green,” to her young ear, became “Lady Mondegreen.” (Other frequently cited, if not quite current, mondegreens include, “Secret Asian man,” “Chicken to ride” and “ ’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”)

The mondegreen we’re discussing today is “fanute” — rhymes with salute. French Montana, a rapper from Morocco by way of the Bronx, seems to say it on Rick Ross’s “Stay Schemin’,” a recent mix-tape hit. Type “fanute” into Twitter’s search, and you’ll probably see a new tweet surface every 30 seconds or so, with someone misquoting the lyric in question (sometimes ironically) or asking what “fanute” means or just jokingly using it in a sentence. All this was uncovered by a writer, Joe Coscarelli, who discovered that “What does ‘fanute’ mean?” was a recommended Google search; the query was that popular. The word has taken on a life of its own since, and as with many slang terms we adopt into our vocabulary, the line between ironic and sincere usage is never entirely clear, as irony frequently leads to sincerity. “I’ve come so far in the last two, three years. But one never stops improving, so I’ll continue to fanute,” someone tweeted, seemingly sincerely; when someone else tweeted on June 28, “Fanute that health care, dawg,” it was done obviously a bit less so

So what is the true meaning of “fanute”? Most likely in an effort to save syllables, or out of pure laziness, French Montana omitted most of the hard consonants from the words “from the hoopty coupe to that Ghost, dog” leading to the mondegreen “fanute the coupe to that Ghost, dog.” Fanute is not unlike Larson’s cow’s “saw”: “fanute” is a figment of the viewer/listener’s imagination, and because of the way the sentence is structured, “fanute” appears to be a transitive verb, thus sending the listener on a potentially vexing quest for meaning where there is none to be found. A music blogger who goes by Mobb Deen, who has a bit of an obsession with this particular mondegreen, has since defined “fanute” as: 1. v., To convert; to turn less into more via “swag.” Or 2. Anything you want it to mean

Not everyone is satisfied with this chaos, however, and one site in particular, RapGenius, has harnessed the power of the masses to guarantee that you never embarrass yourself at a party with a rap mondegreen again. It’s a wiki-style site that posts song lyrics and invites users to offer explanations for potentially obscure references or difficult-to-understand phrasings. At RapGenius, you’ll find Montana’s lyrics transcribed properly, and you’ll also find an explanation in a pop-up window: “ ‘Ghost, dog’ refers to the extremely expensive Rolls-Royce Ghost, which Montana now claims to be driving in place of his old, beat-up car.” It is even accompanied by an image of the Rolls-Royce. This read of Montana’s lyrics — most likely 100 percent correct (and fanutelessly dry) — was added by the user SameOldShawn, whose “Rap IQ” on the site has surpassed 100,000 points. RapGenius ranks its users, and at 10 points per “good” explanation and 20 points per “great,” you can safely assume that SameOldShawn keeps busy supporting RapGenius’s efforts

The perhaps fallacious assumption at the Web site’s heart is that every rap lyric has a meaning and that the meaning of every rap lyric should be unearthed. It’s true that rap is routinely made up of arcane local vernacular, references to pop culture, snippets of other rap lyrics and even music-industry, inside-baseball jargon. Yet part of the joy of listening to a lot of rap music is having all this unfold for you as you become more familiar with it. And furthermore, you need look no further than the work of Das EFX, Cam’ron or Ghostface Killah to find that between the playful nature of the genre and its formal strictures, plenty of rap lyrics have absolutely no meaning at all. Cam’ron claims, in the opening line to “Get Em Girls,” that he can “get computers ’putin’ ” What can we possibly do with that?

Victor Vazquez from the Brooklyn rap duo Das Racist once referred to RapGenius as “white-devil sophistry” on a song called “Middle of the Cake.” And yes, that lyric, too, is dissected on RapGenius — pull it up, and you’ll find a freestyle rap on video from an editor of the site, shirtlessly and awkwardly refuting the claim. If the RapGeniuses are sophists — like the sneaky Greek philosophers who perniciously used logic to lead followers to illogical conclusions — then their wrongheaded conclusion is perhaps that all of this can, or should, be explained in a linear, X-means-Y fashion. Which means that in this online world of prescriptive listening, there is no room for fanute

RapGenius is part of a broader effort in recent years, both online and in print, to organize rap lyrics into something more useful to listeners, as if rap lyrics qua rap lyrics were utterly useless. In 2010, Yale University Press published the Anthology of Rap, which canonizes dozens of rap songs — or more specifically, their lyrics — as a sort of poetry. Not only does the anthology include verses “that were almost certainly not written by the performer credited — ghostwriting has been and always will be part of the genre — it warrants mentioning that the anthology contains more than a few transcription errors of its own, chronicled by Paul Devlin in Slate. For example, Devlin points out that the transcription of 50 Cent’s lyrics from “Ghetto Qua’ran” would have it that George Wallace, the segregationist four-time Alabama governor, was dealing cocaine in Jamaica, Queens — instead of Gerald Wallace, the drug dealer 50 Cent actually references. (Alas, no RapGeniuses were present to correct them.)

This isn’t merely a detached academic’s game, however. Jay-Z put out the book “Decoded” in 2010, in which he “decodes” the lyrics to a number of his better-known songs, while tying them back to his life story. The notion that Jay-Z’s lyrics need some sort of Rosetta Stone is somewhat strange, though — he is indeed talented, but he is also an incredibly accessible lyricist

Whereas “Decoded” and RapGenius at least encourage the exegesis of lyrics, elsewhere online, rap lyrics are treated more like a form of structured data. RapMetrics, for instance, is a fascinating project by a chemical-engineering student named Liban Ali Yusuf; it is both a rhyming dictionary and a source of more-provocative analytical projects. In one, Yusuf sifted through lyrics by white and black artists and generated a list of “white” words and “black” words. A few “black” words: Houston, mink, Impala. A few “white” words: rotting, nuggets, ninja (which: ugh). On the less sophisticated end of things, far away from RapMetrics (which is a truly impressive project) we have the circa 2008 meme of presenting rap lyrics in graphical form. For example, in one tongue-in-cheek graph designed to show the proportional relationship described by Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy and Ma$e on “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” the X axis is labeled “money” and the Y axis is labeled “problems.”
As lyrically dense as rap can be, it’s no wonder that the lyrics present themselves as a problem to be solved, something to be organized either in wiki fashion or to be parsed like raw data. In wiki arrangement, the lyrics are treated as having no intrinsic value beyond the references they make; as raw data, they are done away with almost entirely. Both approaches belie an attitude that ultimately creates distance between the listener and the music: rap lyrics are data; rap lyrics are graphs. Rap lyrics are poetry to be read in your smoking jacket with a glass of Cognac (E. & J., sir? I recommend you fanute to the Louis XIII?). Perhaps this is reflective of a certain discomfort that rap music’s ever-broadening fan base has with the genre (or a discomfort with its own outsider’s unfamiliarity with the genre). It at least suggests a nascent anxiety: that to appreciate the music in a direct and visceral or even emotional way would be untoward for the effete, urbane listener. It is hard to imagine this brand of wink-wink analysis happening to any other form of music — make a graph out of Band of Horses lyrics, and see if anyone laughs

More to the point, however, is that this rigorous organization of rap lyrics into structured and unstructured data sets, into problems to be solved, exists in direct opposition to accidental mondegreens like “fanute,” which can arise only from actually listening to the music, rather than fussing over it as if it were your homework. The Internet is a powerful research tool, and apparently we’ve decided to use it to enable crowdsourced pedantry of the most obnoxious sort. Anyone with a laptop can be as authoritative as Springfield’s Comic Book Guy now, and apparently that’s something to be celebrated. We can turn something that ought to be enjoyed into something that owes us an explanation for its existence, into something that must reveal its underlying worth. We can use the Internet to sniff out and suffocate every mystery from all four corners of the globe, from the grandest conspiracies to the pettiest dispute. Yet despite these attempts to control, categorize and define, there’s still somehow room for mondegreens like “fanute” to break through and remind you why you like listening to rap

While “Cow Tools” is funny on its own, sort of, it’s at least twice as funny with the knowledge that it vexed so many readers — even the cow looks angry. “Fanute” is similar. It’s a reminder that, in the face of this wave of rationalization brought on by the Internet, we’re still capable of appreciating the chaos. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some fanuting to do around the house