The Aer is Full of Meaning (See What I Did There?)

 So for my song lyrics I chose a line from “Floats My Boat” by Aer. The line goes, “Live it up ‘till I’m dead, Ignorance in my head, Fuck whoever you are, I do what floats my boat.” First off, sorry for the profanity if anyone’s offended. Anyway, I felt like this set of lyrics speaks directly to a younger generation of people. Like many popular songs today, they follow along the lines of doing whatever you want and not caring what anyone else thinks. I’m sure everyone knows all about the phrase YOLO (You Only Live Once). This is a very familiar feeling among young people (especially college kids). We still have this air of invincibility about us that make us kind of cocky and ignorant. Obviously not everyone, but I feel like I fall under that stereotype. Although Aer is not from the ghetto or rap about dealing drugs and killing people, they still resemble the Hip-Hop discourse community. They use a rhyme scheme, and often reference drinking and smoking (what rapper doesn’t these days).The fact that these lines are so simple directly reflects their style of music. Aer tends to use slower, melodious beats with simple guitar parts that give off a warm feeling.

While I was trying to choose some good song lyrics, I kept going to RapGenius.com to make sure I was getting the right lyrics. When talking about L’il Wayne in class, we mentioned how different words have different meanings depending on how a particular discourse community views them. We touched on how an outsider might not necessarily understand all the references being made throughout the song, but RapGenius had a solution for that. Once you search the lyrics you are looking for, you can move the cursor over a particular line or phrase and a brief explanation of that line/phrase appears! I found this extremely interesting, as well as helpful. While I am fairly familiar with the Hip-Hop genre, I don’t know every “beef” artists have or every slang word they invent. While RapGenius doesn’t necessarily go in and evaluate the styles of particular lyrics, I felt like the explanations they provided were in some ways a type of close reading. I know it definitely helped me while I was close reading songs, and I feel like it goes to show how complex and involved the language of the Hip-Hop community has become. It was also something that I never really thought about before when I used their site. Interested me at least.