The 6 Least Hip Internet References in Song Lyric History

Fast Internet
Stay connected in a jet
Wi-Fi, podcast
Blasting out an SMS
Text me and I text you back
Check me on the iChat
I'm all about that h-t-t-p
You're a PC, I'm a Mac.

Myspace in your space
Facebook is a new place
Dip divin', socializin'
I'll be out in cyberspace
Google is my professor
Wikipedia checker
Checkin' my account
Loggin' in and loggin' out.

As you see, we're treated to a Tourette-like stream of everything related to the Internet, including some words that he clearly doesn't understand (will.i.am's humbling knowledge of podcasts consists of listing it alongside Wi-Fi and moving on to the next verse). He also says "blasting out an SMS" before solemnly promising "text me and I text you back," which seems to indicate that he is not aware that SMS and text messaging are the same thing.

Then, the Peas toss out a blazingly topical reference to those PC and Mac commercials with Justin Long and John Hodgman, which you may recognize as already being three years old by the time the song was released. This leads triumphantly into the lyric "Myspace in your space, Facebook is a new place," which was inexplicably written in the year 2009. Facebook was not "new" by any means -- Mark Zuckerberg had already teamed up with Justin Timberlake and taken over the social networking universe, and Myspace was that place you went to listen to Jason Mraz remixes posted by some lunatic in Connecticut and get made fun of for not being on Facebook yet.

The Peas were clearly attempting to write a big, epic anthem for the digital generation, but they just came across sounding like middle-aged parents trying to relate to their teenagers. Can you picture your mom bragging that she's "all about that h-t-t-p"? Of course you can't, because not even she is that lame.

Baby girl sent a picture to my BlackBerry
She fine and she thick just like Halle Berry
Kiss me through the phone, LOL smiley face
We can go and kick it babe, later on at my place
She message me on Myspace, told me she love me.

Soulja Boy may be the worst offender of them all, which is unsurprising considering everything he's ever been a part of. In a song released in 2009, he's telling us all about getting "picture messages" on his BlackBerry and trolling Myspace for girls. You may recognize these as activities people engaged in when Dane Cook was still relevant. It sounds like a 70-year-old man with a child's vocabulary getting excited over finally discovering how email works.

Sadly, this trio of bards is not done impressing you. They brag about "pics on my iPhone/Gucci on her iPod," rhyme the word "berry" with itself, and unleash "do the grown" as a euphemism for sex as if it's a storied old favorite, even though no one outside of these barely literate millionaires has ever encountered it in the history of the English language.

The lyrics in that first passage seem to be a cautionary tale on stalker assistance via the careless use of social networking, as the girl in question offers up both her location and the fact that she is completely alone to a man who's begging her for sex. He also confuses the "tongue smiley" emoticon as a binding sexual contract, despite the fact that it is typically used by teenage girls to let you know when they are being adorably irreverent.

But now I'm looking for some friends to add
Text me baby send me a ?

But if you wanna hop on you can log on to my balls like my drawers got a dot com.

The song goes back and forth between presenting Grafh as a trend-savvy dude well-versed in the latest technology and as a temporally displaced caveman who doesn't understand how something as small as a cellphone can hold the witches that are obviously powering it.

He is apparently so enchanted by the idea of text messaging that he believes it to be proof of some higher power, and offers a solemn prayer to the heavens after receiving one from the future missing persons report he's currently pursuing. At the same time, he is so bored with texting that he nonchalantly brags about not even reading the message in its entirety, saying that he just skimmed it until he saw the word "sex." Beyond the fact that this is one of the most bracing contradictions ever delivered in such rapid succession, it's also kind of like telling a girl that you don't follow the news, you just speed-read USA Today for the words "nipple" and "smother."

Grafh then goes on to mention Myspace way too often to convince us that he's ever actually used the damn thing, and constantly confuses social networking with text messaging. He seems unclear about whether putting someone's number in your phone qualifies as "adding a friend" and if getting a message on Myspace is called "texting."

But of course, all of this is just leading up to "log on to my balls like my drawers got a dot com," which is a sentence that reads exactly like an Internet-themed Mad Libs puzzle and makes the exact same amount of sense. We get that his point is "I want to have sex with you," but it's shoehorned into one of the most awkward punchlines in history. Innuendo is rarely clever, but it seems like Grafh just picked two random phrases from a mid-'90s article about AOL and made them about his nutsack. He might as well have said, "I'm going to double-click your vagina and download in my pants."

In the video, little Billy belts out hackneyed Internet references through the fangle-toothed jungle in his mouth while Rosie O'Donnell does her best to ride his coattails into a future doubtless paved in sunshine and victory (spoiler: it wasn't).

So, Billy is in a rush to get his Christmas list to Santa, because for some reason a 12-year-old boy just had too many things on his schedule to allow time to demand free gifts from a fantasy character he shares no other type of contact with. Billy then asserts that Father Christmas will be receiving his message via global satellite, which suggests that he doesn't entirely understand how the Internet works, although Santa would probably have to have some kind of crazy expensive 4G plan to check his Gmail from the North Pole.

In the very next line, Billy delights us all by pummeling the acronym for hypertext transfer protocol into catch-all slang for using the Internet ("I'm sending it out h-t-t-p"), vernacular that had not, at that point, ever been adopted by anyone outside of him and his Bob Newhart Christmas sweater (indeed, it has not been used by anyone since, other than by the Black Eyed Peas in the song we mentioned at the start).

Remember, this is a kid who was raised during the initial worldwide explosion of this technology, yet he sounds about as comfortable with the terminology as every white person who saw Rosewood in the theater was with their evening. If you're 12 and already that clueless about modern technology, you might as well just pack it in and retreat into obscurity, which is precisely what Billy Gilman did.

T-Pain and J-Shin collaborated on this song back in 2006, and judging by these lyrics, it seems to be about a douchebag and his haunted computer:

Two o'clock in the mornin', I'm sleepin'
And something wakes me but I don't know what it is (You've got mail)
It's my ex, prob'ly just misses my sex
Lemme get up and see what the deal, what the hell
It's cryin' faces all over my screen
And a picture of her eye
Try to tell myself this ain't nothing to LOL about.

After being inexplicably woken up by an email message (which we're guessing has happened to exactly zero people currently reading this article, because that is not how email works), J-Shin checks his Myspace to see a billion pictures of his weepy ex-girlfriend, heartsick over the breakup for reasons we cannot understand.

To be fair, this is a scenario that still occurs today (albeit now on Facebook), but nothing dates your rap opus quite like peppering it with cameos of Tila Tequila, a Playboy model who was briefly famous in the mid-2000s for having, like, seriously, a ton of friends on Myspace. This particular skill was difficult to monetize (because it is completely worthless), so she was clumsily shoved into television and movies by ill-advised producers trying to catch some of that "Hey, here's that lady from that thing you kids like" magic.

J-Shin delivers a few more lines about emailing this girl back and forth, including the phrase "you've got mail," which you may notice was disqualified from rap lyrics back in 1998 by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Then T-Pain takes the keyboard away from him to type out a reply to set this girl straight, and accidentally delivers the greatest moment in the entire song:

What the deal?
Why you actin' like a n***a wasn't street?
Why you actin' like I wasn't sweet?
Why you actin' like I didn't sweep you off your feet?
Why you actin' like a n***a didn't wanna take you out to eat?

There's no forced Internet reference here. That last line is just too hilarious not to mention.

Let's meet at the same time
Same place
Send your jpeg, I wanna see your face
Girlfriend, send an I.M.

TTYL
No time to spell
Oops, there goes that little bell
Bye, bye for now
BBFN

Hey, LOL, G2G
I gotta go, but baby watch for me 'cause
I'll be right back, BRB
So sign on, and I.M. me.

Mom thinks I'm doing homework
Yeah, research
But I can't help it, I've just got to surf
I gotta chat with my girlfriends online

We're digital divas
Believe us
This Girl Wide Web is hot stuff
My buddy list is growing all the time

I got a Web page
A domain
Sign my guest book with your screen name
Check it out, then send an I.M.

What's your profile?
Favorite quote?
This is just like passing notes
It's easier to type than use a pen.

Nikki punches us in the face with AOL Instant Messenger references (which was experiencing the height of its popularity at the time) while confusingly addressing both her girlfriends and someone she insists on calling "baby" at random intervals. That's the whole song, by the way -- just singing about talking to people online about absolutely nothing in particular. There's a hip-sounding buzzword in literally every line of the song's four-minute duration, which is impressive considering that HOLY GOD, THIS GOES ON FOR FOUR MINUTES?

Even though she assures us that there's "no time to spell" (and really who would want to, what with typing being easier than using a pen?), Nikki still breaks down her favorite acronyms for us, many times over, lest we be lost in a fog of confusion and unable to follow along. The worst thing is, she isn't wrong. Every single text-speak acronym she rattles off is totally correct, situationally appropriate, and still being used a decade later by people twice her freaking age.

Her prescience isn't without its limits, though. She falls into the same trap that everyone else seemed to back then and tries to make up her own slang -- the "Girl Wide Web" never caught on. That's probably for the best, because we are certain that if you type "girl wide web" into a search engine, the results will in no way resemble whatever Lizzie McGuire bullshit that 13-year-old girl was singing about. Also, nobody has signed a guestbook since 1997, and this song came out in 2002. She might as well have thrown in a lyric about the frames on her Angelfire page. Nice try, Nikki. Now aren't you glad you didn't release this under your own name?

Jason Iannone is a humorist and editor for hire. Everything he writes is collected in one easy-to-use Tumblr. Liking him on Facebook and following him on Twitter helps an angel get its wings.

For more terrible feats of lyricism, check out The 10 Least Romantic Love Song Lyrics and The 11 Most Unintentionally Gay Rap Lyrics Ever.