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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

Gotta wonder about the garbage-in factor of Rap Genius. From one randomly selected Aesop Rock cut:

"Please I want to donate my brain to the monstrous Panasonic profit"

I guess it could be. I always heard it as "monstrous Panasonic prophet." It would be in keeping with the previous lyric "Television, all hail grand pixelated god of fantasy."

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In that instance my guess is that he probably used a homonym on purpose. Perhaps another interesting breakdown would account (and give extra points) for homonyms since it's sort of 2 words.

There's some other howlers in the same song like "canope" instead of "canopy", "intervenes" instead of "intravenous".

fixed.

This song has no credited transcripter, so it was one of the originals added to "bootstrap" the site, and hence has a lot lower quality then the later songs added and cleaned up by users.

Profit makes more sense to me, because it ties into the directly proceeding line "Please take me, please calm me, please make me a zombie". Aes is clearly talking about advertising and (broadly) media here, and while the double meaning of "prophet" does contribute to the line, the surface meaning is that he's donating his brain (attention) to the Panasonic profit (from advertising).

However, that said, that page (http://rapgenius.com/Aesop-rock-basic-cable-lyrics) does need some love. You should help out! Use the "suggestions" box on individual annotations to leave things for Editors (trusted members of the community, like myself) to integrate into the existing annotations.

It's obviously both "profit" and "prophet." Neither one is wrong.

I can see it either way, but this isn't quantum mechanics. It cannot in fact be both words at once.

Of course it can be both. If he deliberately chose it because it is a homophone and intended for either interpretation to work, then it's both.

Actually, that's a hugely common thing to do in rap: make a word ambiguous between 2 to add some more depth to the song.

While not rap, St. Vincent[1] may want to have some words with you.

Ambiguity can definitely be used in art.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whxF0KhBR84

While neither is really wrong, you've still got to choose one to put on the lyrics page. I believe I outlined my reasons for thinking one is the surface meaning and one is a double meaning.

since i use only rap genius data, i'm hoping the garbage all cancels out so that the rappers are still relatively in the right place.

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