Four, Five Seconds - Verse 2

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics, the podcast where we break down English language song lyrics to help improve your grammar, vocabulary, and general knowledge of English. I am your host Jake, and today we are discussing verse 2 of the song "Four, Five Seconds" by Rihanna, Kanye West, and Paul McCartney. If you haven't listened to the first two episodes where we discuss this song, I recommend going back and starting with them! Additionally, if you've never listened to this podcast before, I recommend starting on the episode titled "Introduction". Okay, enough of that, let's jump right back in!

"Woke up an optimist, sun was shinin', I'm positive'

We immediately start with some pretty bad grammar, though it's easy enough to understand. Let's clean it up!

The first point of bad grammar is pretty obvious, we're missing our subject! "Woke up an optimist". The subject is usually a pretty crucial part of a sentence! Since later in the song the singer adds in the subject "I", we can infer that the subject here is the word "I", and that our singer is singing in the first person. "I woke up an optimist."  However, we still haven't completely cleaned up the grammar. We have a bit of ambiguity or vagueness remaining in the second half of this sentence. This sentence could mean one of two things.

If we take what he's singing at face value, that is to say, we assume that he means it as literally as possible, we have the sentence "I woke up an optimist". That would mean that there was a person, an optimist, who was asleep, and that our singer woke them up. Do you think that's what our singer means? That he found an optimist somewhere and woke them up?

This would be a really strange thing to say, and doesn't really make any sense in the context of our song. So this is probably not his actual meaning.

Thankfully, there's another way we can read the word "wake" here that helps us make sense of it all. Wake can either mean to wake someone else up, an action your performing on them, or to wake yourself up. What if instead of waking someone else up, he's just talking about himself? If that's the case, we're going to need to add another word into our sentence to help clear things up.

Any idea what word we could add to make the sentence a little bit clearer? Take a minute to think about it.

The word we can add is the word "as". "I woke up AS an optimist." What the word "as" does here is instead of having two people, our singer and this other person, an optimist, we make the singer INTO the optimist. Instead of the singer waking someone else up, instead he is waking up and at the moment that he woke up, he was an optimist. While not the literal meaning of his original sentence, this meaning would be the first one that most people would think of. We infer the word "as".

Another way to say this, would be to say that he woke up "feeling" optimistic. What does it mean to be an optimist or to be optimistic?

An optimist is someone who can see the good in any situation. They don't feel down or depressed when something bad happens. Instead they focus on the good or "positive" things. Positive things are good things, and negative things are bad things. So for an optimist, every situation has a positive side! To wake up as an optimist means that you woke up feeling good about the world, your life, or your situation. Do you know what the opposite of an optimist is? If you said "pessimist", nice job! Did you wake up this morning as an optimist or as a pessimist? Why is that?

Great, so we've figured out the very first line. This sets us up for some wordplay in the next sentence. "Wordplay" is when you do something clever or fun with words. Sometimes this is a joke, like a pun. Other times it can be something like a word that has two meanings or both of the meanings work at the same time.

See if you can spot the wordplay in the second line: "Sun was shinin', I'm positive".

The first part "Sun was shinin'" doesn't need much explanation, except to say that if we were to say this with correct grammar we would say "The sun was shining". Simple enough. The second part is where we find our wordplay. "I'm positive." Do you see what he did there?

If you don't see it, don't worry. Let's dig into it a bit. We have two potential meanings for the phrase "I'm positive" and both work within context of the song. The first one fits more neatly into the grammatical structure of the song. One sense of the phrase "I'm positive" means the same thing as "I'm sure" or "I'm sure of it." It is affirming what you were saying before. If I said to you "What color is the sky?" and you answered "Blue.", I might ask you "Are you sure?" and you could respond "I'm positive." It would mean the same thing as if you'd responded by saying "Yes, I'm sure."

The singer says that he woke up, and that the sun was shining. He's telling us a story of something that happened in the past. So this sense of the phrase "I'm positive" can mean that he's affirming that the sun was indeed shining. He's saying "I'm sure that the sun was shining when I woke up this morning." This too can have a double meaning. The first, that factually the sun was indeed shining, and the second, we could use the "sun was shining" as a metaphor that means he was feeling happy, or...optimistic. We have wordplay within our wordplay. Pun-ception!

The second meaning of the phrase "I'm positive" relates to the first line of our verse. Our singer being an optimist. Another way you can refer to someone who is optimistic, is by saying that they are a "positive" person or just "positive". I could say "I appreciate that you are always so positive!" This is where he's playing with the words a bit. The first meaning makes the most sense grammatically, but the second sense plays off of the word "optimist" to indicate again, that he is positive. Pretty fun right?

Moving on!

The next line says "Then I heard you was talkin' trash". Again, this is pretty bad grammar. It would be much more correct to say "Then I heard that you were talking trash". The word "that" isn't actually necessary, but it helps make our sentence more clear.

So he heard that somebody, who he's talking to directly, was talking trash. We could add "talking trash...about me". But what does it mean to talk trash about someone? Well if we think about trash, it's not a pretty picture. Trash is dirty and gross and filled with things that nobody wants! So if you are talking "trash" about somebody, that means that you are saying bad things about them. This can also be called "trash" talk. If somebody hates you, they might "talk trash about you" or "trash talk you" to other people.

The verb "trash" can also be used directly. This has a couple of different meanings. If you "trash" someone, it means the same thing as "trash talk". For example, "Did you hear Joe? He was really trashing you!!!"

The second meaning of trash, used as a verb, is to make a mess or mess something up. If you "trash" your room, it means that you've thrown things on the floor, making the room really dirty, or ruined the room in some other way. You can apply this to most anything: a room, a house, your car...even your front lawn.

So to review: trashing someone means talking bad about them. Trashing something means to mess it up, or to dirty it. If you "trash" someone too much, you might "trash" their reputation, that is to say, if you "say mean things about someone" you might "ruin" their reputation. Have you ever had someone "trash" you? Have you ever "trash talked" someone else?

In summary so far, our singer was having a great day, he was feeling positive and optimistic, but then he heard that someone was trash talking him.

The final line says "Hold me back I'm 'bout to spaz"

The only thing to "correct" here is the word "'bout" which is a shortening of the word "about". "Hold me back I'm about to spaz". We could even change it to say "Hold me back, I'm going to spaz", which would more or less keep the meaning.

Let's pause for a second and try to get an image of what's occurring here, to really try to picture the events that are unfolding.

The first words here, "Hold me back", what do they mean? To "hold somebody back" implies that they were moving forward. So we have an image here of our singer moving forward. He's telling somebody to "hold him back". What he wants them to do is to keep him from moving forward. In fact, with the phrase "hold me back", we have an idea that the singer WANTS to move forward.

This is where I want you to really think about what's happening, and I think it will help you understand the phrase fully. Why would the singer be telling somebody to stop him, if he WANTS to move forward? And who is he talking to?

We know a moment ago he was talking to the person trash talking him, so let's assume that the trash talker, that is the person who is trash talking him, is in FRONT of him. So if he was moving forward, he would be moving TOWARDS the trash talker. So he wants to move TOWARDS the person who is saying bad things about him. Why would he want to do that? It's probably because he's angry and he wants to confront or attack the person. That's what he actually *wants* to do.

But what we see here is that even though he is angry, he is somewhat wise as well. He knows that he SHOULDN'T attack this person, but he's not sure that he can stop himself from doing it. So what does he do? He asks somebody else, somebody BEHIND him or BESIDE him to hold him back. And who would be behind you in a situation like this? If you listened to our series on "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" you might have some idea. We can assume that whoever is beside or behind him is his friend. Probably a close friend.

So what we see here is that our singer doesn't have enough SELF-CONTROL to stop himself from attacking the trash talker. He does however have enough wisdom to ask his friend or friends to hold him back, because he is going to try to attack this person.

Our last word we're going to talk about is the word "spaz". Our singer says that he's "about to spaz". This is very similar to the word we talked about in our last episode "wildin'". It means you are going to act in an uncontrolled, wild and crazy way. When someone is acting in this way, you might hear someone say they are "spazzing out". This isn't a very polite word, and in recent years it's usage has begun to be frowned upon more and more. I wouldn't recommend keeping this one in your vocabulary, but it's good to know what it means.

Can you relate to the singer here? Have you ever heard something that made you so angry that you knew you wouldn't be able to control yourself? What did you do?

Well I hope this episode was helpful, and that you are feeling positive and optimistic! Next time we'll be finishing up our song, talking about the bridge and the final verse. I hope you'll join us!

As always, you can find the transcript for this episode in the description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate it and subscribe! We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday! And of course, don't forget to tell your friends about us! We would love to hear from you! e pot even more English learning related content every day on Instagram, username "lelpodcast". There you can interact with us, as well as other English learners. There are weekly questions, as well as helpful images related to our podcast episodes. We’re also active on Reddit and Twitter under the same username, lelpodcast. Finally, if you have any questions, comments, critiques, or suggestions for songs, send us a message to any of our social media accounts, or to our email address "[email protected]". We hope to hear from you soon!