I Am Four Eels

I first heard Outkast’s groundbreaking record Stankonia while on the way to compete in New Jersey. Among the earworm tracks were Gasoline Dreams and B. O. B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), protest songs that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

One track stands out among the razor-sharp angst: Ms. Jackson, a literal apology written by André 3000 (50% of Outkast) to Erykah Badu’s mother. If you were tuned out of music for a while, maybe you missed her rise to popularity during the late 90s; when she and André started dating, Badu was a lot more popular than he was.

Turning an apology into a hit song is an impressive feat.

“Never meant to make your daughter cry / I apologize a trillion times”

Note, though: this is not an apology to Erykah Badu, but instead an apology to her mother. That’s because André 3000 recognizes that the harm that comes from a toxic relationship can often radiate out into family.

More than a decade after first hearing the song, I saw a shockingly good meme based on a misheard lyric. The astute reader will note that the title I picked for today—I Am Four Eels—qualifies as a mondegreen.

Someone really ran with this and extended the set up like this:

I’m sorry, Ms. Jackson… I am four eels / Never meant to make your daughter cry, I am several fish and not a guy.

This line seems like a great drunken octopus type candidate—an obscure fact that the modern internet now lets you track down—but alas, we only know this surfaced some time around 2016. By the early 2020s, it had spread throughout the web, as great memes do.

Here’s a guy pouring his heart out to his baby’s mama’s mama, and here we have the internet mocking the way the words sound. Our most serious and heartfelt moments also leave us most open to mockery, but then again: if you’re going to be mocked, this is the way to be mocked!