In one of those instructive “you’ve been using hairgrips wrong your whole life” moments, the backwards lyrics in Missy Elliott’s 2002 banger Work It have been rediscovered, to online palpitations. The line following, “I put my thing down flip it and reverse it,” one of the trickiest portions of a song to navigate in the entire art of karaoke, is not “Fner nyer finipippy pal myap” but “I put my thing down flip it and reverse it,” reversed.
Realising that Elliott isn’t spitting gibberish must be one of the last examples of lyric-related pleasure to be had in the digital age, which has – through a combination of readily available audio technology and extreme nerdiness – largely ruined the misheard lyric. Through resources such as the Genius hive mind or the argumentative comments of songmeanings.com, almost every song has been dissected ad infinitum. The days of disappointment that an album didn’t come with a lyric sheet, and subsequent repeated plays to try to figure out exactly what Kurt Cobain is screaming during In Utero’s Tourette’s, for example, are long gone.
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