I find this line from Si Dwn absolutely hilarious:
Nobody nevah seh yuh a sell yuh body! – And if yuh did, bebeh, dat a yuh prerogative.
Which is literally just “One of the compliments I’d pay you is that no one would ever call you a whore! Except, like, if you were a sexworker, that would be cool with me too, because feminism yo.”
Honestly, I love everything about this. The cognitive dissonance. The sudden switch into a more formal register. The way he tries to rhyme “body” with “prerogative”. The “how do you do, fellow liberals?” tone. The fact that he’s trying so hard. The fact that this is in the middle of a song about how much he loves fucking because basically everything he writes is.
Kartel is my precious baby and I want him to be happy.
my god this song to me is like mwah mwah mwah mwah PREROGATIVE mwah mwah mwah
of all the legible words I would expect to hear in a song that is not one.
Oh, right, I keep forgetting Jamaican patois has low mutual intelligibility with the stuff you guys speak. That’s so weird to me, given that this song is perfectly intelligible to me – it just feels like an odd accent rather than a different language.
Admittedly, some phrases definitely stand out to me as more clear than others. On the other hand, it might just be that they stand out thanks to sounding funny, like “coming soon to a pussy near you” in New Jordans:
”it just feels like an odd accent rather than a different language.”
An odd accent is often enough to render speech unintelligible, though, especially when sung.
(Mind you, I seem to be unusually bad at this. I knew somebody once from Venezuela. After a year of hanging out in groups including her ~3 hours/week, I was still getting maybe three or four words in five. And I was alone in this: often, everyone else would laugh at something she’d said, and I didn’t laugh because I hadn’t understood enough of it to know that it was funny.)
Meanwhile, on the other end of the language spectrum from Hard Mode singing, we have Easy Mode reading (your mileage may vary). The written-out lyrics at the beginning of this thread mostly made sense (and I did laugh at the joke), and completely made sense once I noticed I’d misread “seh” as another “sell”.
(I wonder if ability to parse odd accents is positively correlated with ability to parse individual voices at crowded parties. You’ve mentioned being fairly good at that.)
Tags:
#language #nsfw text #reply via reblog #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
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