Not only am I a sexually deviant, misogynistic, immoral, wealthy, male prostitute, but I also sit on the board of directors of the organization that governs others of my kind.

Lyrics:
Ghouls attack the church
Crush the holy priest
Turning the cross towards hell
Writhe in satan's flames

TRANSLATION: Legions of undead creatures are laying seige to a denominational Christian house of worship. Said creatures plan to administer grievous bodily harm to the resident authority figure via a sudden and violent application of pressure, which will surely result in contusions and great discomfort. As a religious symbol of great import is inverted to represent a rejection of its implicit value system, it will also be set ablaze. This act yields a twofold result; adding further physical discomfort to the already-suffering religous representative, and also eliciting gyrations of a sensual nature on the part of those who have pledged allegiance to the diametrically-opposed teachings of the fallen archangel, Lucifer, of whom I consider myself a representative.

Lyrics:
Crush the priest
The feeble church

TRANSLATION: I order you now to join the army of undead creatures in their physical abuse of the clergyman. I have adjudged the status of the Christian religion as a whole and found it to be lacking in sufficient force to defend itself against attack.

Lyrics:
Dead - your god is dead
Fools - your god is dead
Useless prayers of lies
Behold satan's rise

TRANSLATION: Currently the abstract sentient being that you worship is deceased. Belief in this single all-powerful monotheistic entity is surely a sign of buffonery on your part since, as I restate, this entity has ceased to exist. Therefore, your continued entreaties for the extinct spirit to intervene on your behalf are not only futile, but may also be patently false. Now please bear witness to the consequential elevated status of my preferred symbolic personification of evil-doing. Hooray!

The fist will run
Grasp metal to gun
The Spirit sings in crashing tones
We gain the battle drum
Our cries will shrill the air, will moan and crash into the dawn
The pen won't stay the demon's wings, the hour approaches
Pounding out the Devil's sermon

translation:

The clenched digital unit shall sprout additional limbs and with them make rapid headway towards the scrapyard, whereupon it shall seize all residual scrap, creating from its confiscations a ballistic weapon. Meanwhile, an immortal, wraithlike chanteuse is experimenting with the use of trash-can lids instead of vocal-cords, although we're about to counteract this cacophony with one of our own, since we've somehow got hold of a pristine military tom-tom and are probably annoying the neighbours with it. My, when our parents find us here we'll wake the whole damn STREET up with our bawling! The very nitrogen-oxygen suspension we inhabit will find its vocal range shifted decidedly upwards, but we're not stopping there, because when we get round to complaining about our cancelled privileges to Mom and Dad, the rarefactions and compressions occasioned by our lungs, throats and mouths will subsequently collide with the current time of day, it being virtually morning by the time we're caught. Back to the magical world of dungeons and dragons, however, because our silly Spirit appears to be attempting to prevent a VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing)-class maleovolent supernatural being from taking flight, armed only with a basic water-based writing implement, and by now everything's going to the dogs because the current time of day is getting slightly irritated by our noise and is stomping over to sort us out, stopping en route to deliver the Satanic Lectures via Morse Code to a bunch of gasping tourists...

That being said, those Notorious B.I.G. lyrics hardly need a gloss. And as was pointed out, the one reference to the Wayans brothers goes un-"translated", which sucks. There's plenty of stuff out there that's a thousand times more cryptic; there's plenty of stuff out there that goes over my head, and I'd love to see it glossed and analyzed. Like some of this for instance.

I actually went and dug up that copy of XXL. It's the first issue, cover has Jay-Z circa Reasonable Doubt (in the article the reporter's following him around Europe as he opens for The Fugees).

The Biggie article is called "Notorious Ebonics," and here's the leadoff:

Yeah, we know that the whole Ebonics thing played out some months back, but we had to make an exception. What you are about to read is one of the most ingenius things that we have ever encountered in our entire lives. A few short weeks after Biggie was murdered, it circulated by e-mail throughout the music industry, helping to break the tension for many of us.

This is supposed to be the winning paper in an Oakland public schools' language translation competition. The assignment was to translate Biggie's lyrics into standard English. In reality, it's a joke, although several people did think it was real. The original composer or composers have yet to come forward. Whoever they are, they should know that this thing brightened more than a few days.

And, oh yeah, please know that you will never see the word "Ebonics" in this magazine again.

Kinda surprised they printed the thing without knowing authorship?

must be why they never reviewed big l's last album