Order in the court!

The English language has had enough. For 20+ years, it has been misused and abused accidentally, on purpose, and with glee by rap music. However, Judge J-Zone, while sympathetic of the plaintiff’s claims, sees the entertainment in bending, twisting out of shape, and completely mangling the King’s English. The purpose of this trial is to decide what needs to be done about this quagmire. Should rappers be required to pass high school English before releasing their work to the public? Or should Merriam-Webster take the stick out of their ass and amend the dictionary and all grammar rules to suit the ingenuity of rap(pers)?

Poor spelling, exceedingly poor grammar, words that don’t exist, and mumble-mouthed phrases that were shrouded in mystery until one day you got really high and decoded what the fuck was being said – they all ran rampant on the late ’80s and early ’90s rap releases. Rap music crammed three times the amount of words onto an album than any other genre at three times the speed, so a bludgeoning of the King’s English was a mere side effect. As long as these errors were laid down with flair, nobody noticed (or cared). Rappers were Gods to those of us born in the ’70s, so it wasn’t a surprise that I told my ninth grade English teacher that “stoled” is the double past tense of stole because Tim Dog said it. Here are some of the greatest ‘what the fuck?’ pronunciation and grammar taboos in rap history.

Note: Keep in mind, the fairly common “I ain’t be got no weapon” and “let me ‘ax’ you a question” were not included. Doing so would make this a 25,000 word essay and we ain’t that starched ’round here.

Part One: Spelling

As we’ve discovered via Twitter, most rappers can’t spell for poodle poop. (They also have love affairs with the caps lock button.) And it’s not necessarily due to the acronyms and abbreviations (Ex.: IDK for ‘I don’t know’ or hate spelled as ‘h8′) used to cram what would normally be a 156-character brain fart into 140 or a neighboring letter on the keypad replacing the intended one by mistake (Ex.: stupid spelled as ‘stipid’). The origins of egregious rap spelling mistakes date as far back as 1989, when hip-hop’s first widely-known egregious spelling error popped up on wax. The location was EPMD’s “Knick Knack Patty Wack”, which was the launching pad for spell-a-holic MC K-Solo.

“I’m from C.I., L.I., F-L-Y / like a B-R-I-D, in the S-K-Y”

Did Solo mean to spell brie (as in the cheese)? Maybe he meant to spell brim (as in the hat). I’m pretty sure he meant to spell bird, but you have to go back and listen for shit like this during mix down. Solo, Erick Sermon, Parrish Smith, and Charlie Marotta (the engineer) are all at fault for allowing this to happen. I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the greatest rap posse cuts of all time, though. I think K-Solo got the point after playing it numerous times – he re-recited the rhyme on “The Real Solo Please Stand Up” on his album a year later and did in fact give the bird its proper respect with a correct spelling.

Next up, the cousin of Biz Markie, Diamond Shell. Obviously Diamond Shell knows how to spell his own name, but he referred to himself as “the D-I-A-M-N-O-D”. The song the aforementioned error appeared on was “A Bugged out Day at Power Play”, which was essentially a freestyle, so Mr. Shell gets a pass.

The best of the litter, however, comes from the cousin of Dr. Dre, Mr. Warren G. Warren G’s Regulate: The G-Funk Era album sounds like one long West side freestyle, fueled by Chronic smoke, Hennessey, low riders, and synthesizers. That being said, I have no idea if he freestyled this or what, but there’s no way you can misspell a word in your song title in rhyme, but spell it correctly when listing it on the CD artwork. From “What’s Next?”:

“What’s next, what’s next, what’s N-X-E-T?”

Huh? No matter the motivation for leaving that goof in the song, Warren G proved that rappers don’t need Twitter accounts to show us they spell on a first grade level (clip below at 2:45).

Part Two: Sorry, that word does not exist!

I remember riding in the car with my pops circa 1990, pumping Lord Finesse‘s classic Funky Technician cassette. A seemingly innocuous line caused pops to bust out laughing:

“For Tone, everything was goin’ great / because him and his friends would sit and conversate.”

To a 13-year old kid, conversate sounds like a very impressive and very real word. Apparently, many adults feel the same. Pops said it was not. I didn’t believe him. I hit Webster’s dictionary up to settle the beef. Conversate is not a real word. It cast a feeling of disappointment down on me akin to learning that Santa Claus only does what he does to put little boys on his lap.

As for recent reaches into the land of non-existent words, I must shout out the grilled one, Paul Wall, for this one:

“I pronunciate, my articulate game…”

See, when you follow a non-existent word like pronunciate with a word that has scholarly implications like articulate, you can Jedi Mind trick the listener into thinking the former is a real word. That’s some incredulous, metaphysical, hydrophonic, xenophobic, impeccable shit! Can you pin point which of those adjectives is not a real word?

Part Three: I think you meant to say something else!

When you make a song called “Talkin’ Sense”, I’m not expecting it to be the home to your album’s biggest blunder. For dancer-turned-rapper and style kingpin, Stezo, it was. One day in 1989, he let us know:

“I’m droppin science, I mean intelligence / And all that stuff you’re sayin’ is irrevelant.”

See, this loses some effectiveness in print because when you haphazardly read the (not) word “irrevelant”, you think it really says irrelevant (which is what Stezo meant to say). But when you listen to the clip below (at 1:37), you realize that Stezo really did say irrevelant, killing all relevance of any intelligence.

Furthermore, he rhymed it with intelligence. Beyond that, the next sentence is:

“I’m not bein’ Einstein or a scientist.”

Judging from this blooper and one in the very next song on his Crazy Noise album (“It’s My Turn”, where he states “this is the ‘anthenem’” – not anthem, ‘anthenem’) Stezo is not being Mark Twain or an English major, either. I’ll be damned if Crazy Noise isn’t one of the funkiest albums in rap history, though.

I can’t forget one of my favorite English language manglers, Baby aka Birdman from Cash Money Records.



As a man with family roots in New Orleans, I can link some of Baby’s pronunciation style to accent, but I too want to drive a “Moorsadus” one day. If I make enough money, maybe I can make it plural and buy a fleet of “Moorsaduses”. It must be an incredible feeling to have so much money that you can purchase a Mercedes, but call it a “Moorsadus”. Birdman for president… I’m sure the debt ceiling would then be pronounced the “debit” ceiling and we’d all get free Master Cards.

Finally, we have Sonee Seeza from Onyx. I’m sure a Def Jam A&R wanted to tell him that you can reproduce, you can duplicate, but you cannot “reproduplicate” (from the song “Most Def”). But if the Def Jam A&R had told him that, he would’ve been found shot to death with a thesaurus stuck up his ass a week later.

I could go into rappers saying “pacific” instead of specific, but you can always make the argument that they were really referring to an ocean.

Part Four: Yo, what the fffffuck did you just say?!

In my humble opinion, EPMD was the greatest hip-hop group of all-time. Therefore, I went over their stanzas with a fine-tooth comb. That’s not easy to do when the funky, slurry lisp of Erick Sermon speeds up to cram a thought into a line that isn’t big enough for it. This quagmire caused me to embarrass myself by thinking a gardening product called “Jingaducker” really existed.

“What a way to go out, out like a sucker / but I’m on track, like a lawn on Jingaducker.”

Sometime in the early ’90s, I went to the Pergament hardware store with my grandfather to pick up some peat moss for the house lawn. Sermon’s product endorsement inspired me to ask about this Jingaducker stuff. The salesman looked at me like I was crazy, so I just forgot about it and assumed it was some limited quantity fertilizer only sold in Brentwood, Long Island (EPMD’s hometown).

Twenty years later, we have the internet. The internet has hundreds of lyric sites. This was it! I could now figure out if I had been spelling Jingaducker the wrong way or some shit. While everyone in hip-hop was celebrating the revealing of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation” chorus or the main sample used in Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones Part 2”, I was having my own private party at home. Jingaducker did not exist! Sermon in fact said, “I’m on track, like a Long Island train conductor”. That makes more sense, but it killed me to know that Jingaducker never existed. It hit me then that most rappers couldn’t care less if you understand what they say or not. They understand what they meant and that’s all that matters! Listen to the clip at (0:44) and let me know if I had a right to search high and low for Jingaducker for all those years.

In conclusion:

Let’s face it, the plaintiff has produced evidence that most rappers speak with the clarity of Leon Spinks, spell with the prowess of Dan Quayle, and make as much sense as Carmelo Anthony tweeting about how some people never “seize” to amaze him. But I’ll be damned if any other form of music has challenged the boundaries of correct English and eloquent speaking with this much class and style. “Imaginate” how “unrational” life would be if our rap heroes didn’t put up a fight against this perfect English nonsense (word to Rakim and KRS-One, respectively).

Judge J-Zone decides for the defendant. Now let’s try to get “conversate” a Wikipedia page.

1. • J-Zone Presents… Diggin’ in the (VHS) Tapes: 1991 Wu-Tang Footage
2. • The Wizard of Khalifa: Lal Bhatti’s Bangin’ Bhangra Pittsburgh Steelers Fight Song
3. • WATCH: Edan and Paten Locke Trading Rhymes at Last Night’s High Water Music Showcase.