Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The REAL Mista Tung Twista

Way back in the early 90's, I was rapping along to Tung Twista's debut single "Mista Tung Twista,"* following the lyrics printed in the cassette's sleeve (rap nerdistry for the win!). Well, I quickly noticed that those lyrics were wrong. And not just wrong like the occasional conjunction or syllable was off (which is interestingly the case in a lot of printed rap lyrics), but I mean... they were pretty majorly off. So... I got on my old school word processor I had back then and transcribed these, completely accurate lyrics (did I mention the phrase "rap nerd?"), using the album's transcripts to guide the formatting (some of those line breaks seem a little arbitrary) and clear up some difficult to decipher phrases like "the sucka descendant of Canaan." Remember, this was back in the days before you could just google terms like that and learn that Canaan is "an ancient term for a region encompassing modern-day Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Jordan, Syria and northeastern Egypt."

Well, today I stumbled upon that sheet of paper while going through a couple old boxes. So I decided to scan and post it so you can finally read, for the first time ever, the real "Mista Tung Twista" lyrics:
[I know the text looks a bit small, but you can click to enlarge each verse.]


*It's actually not so impossible if you've got the lyrics memorized.

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