Have you ever been listening to a song only for a completely incorrect statement to take you out of it entirely? Take, for example, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” An incredible and iconic song, it contains the line “Thunder only happens when it’s raining,” which simply isn’t true. But we all let it slide because it sounds great and Stevie Nicks is a legend.
Occasionally, however, musicians find themselves plagued by their own mistakes, as rapper Lil Yachty found out with his 2017 track “Peek a Boo.” The song contains the lines, “My new bitch yellow / She blow that dick like a cello,” which confused so many listeners that he had to address the mistake in a now-viral Genius annotation.
— potato bun (@erewhonsmoothie) August 15, 2023
In it, Lil Yachty (real name: Miles Parks McCollum) writes, “OK, let’s stop for a second. Before you come at me, I’ma let you know. I’ma blame my A&R. Because he listened to that song many times and he allowed me to say that. I guess for a second, I thought a cello was a woodwind instrument and it is not. And nobody ever said shit. Nobody ever pulled up a pic and said, ‘Hey man, I don’t know if you know what this is, but it ain’t that.’”
He concludes with, “I fucked up. I thought Squidward played the cello. He don’t. That’s a flute. I fucked up. But it do sound good,” which in itself is hilarious given the fact that Squidward, SpongeBob SquarePants’ surly neighbor, plays the clarinet, not the flute, a fact many people on Twitter were quick to point out.
screaming "clarinet" at the screen so loud that I pass out
— parody account (@verdantdew) August 15, 2023
Back in 2017 when the song was first released, there was so much drama around this error that it was jokingly dubbed “Cellogate” by at least one publication.
In fairness, Lil Yachty is far from alone in this regard. As other online pedants have been happy to point out, in “Black Skinhead,” Kanye West seems confused about which armies were the focus of the movie 300 — the second line says, “300 bitches, where the Trojans?”, presumably as a reference to condoms, but the Trojans weren’t at the Battle of Thermopylae either.
Reminds me of Kanye’s verse on Poke Her Face where all of the word play is about brains and heads and then he says “she gives me scoliosis until I’m comatosis.” I am positive he thinks scoliosis is a skull disease
— go hang a salami, im a lasagna hog (@MattGrippi) August 15, 2023
Remember when he said "I keep it 300 like the Romans"?
— Ghettofied Astrophysicist (@DemonKingEddy) August 15, 2023
Whoever in the recording process is in charge of fact-checking lyrics so they make a modicum of sense, please stop slacking. Or we can all collectively agree that if a song is good enough, we can turn a blind eye to hilarious factual errors. It’s certainly worked for Stevie Nicks.
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