I do not listen to rap music.  I don't enjoy it.  It is not at all appealing to me because generally the culture expressed in rap music is offensive to women, violent, and full of substance abuse (again, generally).  However, when I am in the presence of others, I do my best to be open and willing to learn about new things.  This is how I have happened upon the song "Turn Down for What" (I use the word "song" in the loosest sense possible) by DJ Snake and Lil Jon (who should probably have an apostrophe in his name somewhere).  While swapping music with a friend, they unfortunately decided to swap this beauty my way.  Thus began my semantic adventure.

For those who are unfamiliar with "Turn Down for What," as I was not long ago (and wish I were today), it is currently #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 music charts.  For about one minute, before I actually watched it, I considered leaving a link to the music video here.  Now, after watching it, I refuse to include a link as to do so would only perpetuate the stupidity expressed in the video. You can find it for yourself if you're interested, but in short, it is a compilation of highly offensive and vulgar images, with a number of those images verging on endorsement of sexual harassment.  However, that is a separate issue for a later time. What is pertinent to this entry is that the lyrics of the "song" consist only of these words: "Fire up that loud. Another round of shots. Turn down for what? "  That is it.  An entire 3 minutes and 36 seconds of those words only. Over, and over, and over, and over again. But, in three minutes and thirty-six seconds of listening to 12 repeated words, a person finds a lot of time to think.  What did I think about in those 3 minutes and 36 seconds, I thought about how I have no idea what "turn down for what" means.

Here is where my scientific curiosity comes into play.  Of course, after hearing these four words that have become quite the summer anthem, and realizing by ignorance with regard to their meaning, I felt that it was important for me to gain a clearer understand DJ Snake and Lil Jon's vision and intention.  I assume, as I think is fair, that all songs have intention.  To identify this intention, I first turned to Webster's Dictionary. That's the holy grail of vocabulary, so it's a good place to start (though I'm not hopeful).  To define this phrase I must first define the pieces of the phrase, those are, "turn down" and "for what."   "For what" is fairly self-explanatory, though its true meaning is dependent on its context (of which we have very little).  So we'll stick with defining "turn down" first.

According to Webster, "Turn down" could mean anything from "to fold or double down", to "to reduce the height or intensity of by turning a control," to "to decline to accept." So, we've got a few definitions to decide between. Context clues usually clear things up when we don't know which definition to go with, (which I learned in third grade while preparing for state exams), but we don't have many of those in writing (only 12 words).  What we do have are context clues from the [god-awful] video, which consists of a number of people uncontrollably gesticulating with their sex parts. This is not a hyper-intellectualized description of what happens in the video.  It is actually what happens in the video.  These people seem relentless with their gesticulations which leads me to believe that "turn down" is what they are not doing.  That would mean we'd be going with the Webster definition of  "to reduce the height or intensity of by turning a control."  It's the "turning a control" part that doesn't fit here.  There weren't any controls in the video.

So this leads me to the holy grail of pop-culture vocabulary--Urban Dictionary.  Usually Urban Dictionary gets me the definitions I need when I'm lost in a sea of slang and street language, and it hasn't failed me yet because according to this "dictionary" "turn down" means "to not get rowdy, remain calm."

Given the visual context clues and the definitions I've gathered, it seems that in saying "Turn down for what"  the song is actually saying "For what reason would we turn down?," or "For what reason would we possibly remain calm?"  Indicating that "to turn down" or remain calm, would be nonsensical and unnecessary.

So now I know,  "turn down for what" really means, "TURN UP!,"  "become very excited,"  "party!"  Good thing for context clues. Without those I still wouldn't know that "turn down for what" is actually a rhetorical question.  Context really does make all the difference. As a final thought, it seems that more words would have given the song more context and made the meaning a bit clearer.  Just a suggestion Lil Jon.  Plenty more where that came from.

Keep on thinking,
Josie