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In Snowgoons "Get Off the Ground" there's the following line:

I'm with the Switzerland wolves we bout to spit some jewels

What does that mean?

2 Answers 2

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Mr. Goon may be referring to the Swiss banking industry, until very recently a major facilitator of international money-laundering per the prior inviolability of the anonymity of account holders.

There are a couple of references that lead me to believe this may be a possibility:

"You not soldiers you stock brokers"

"To turn your safe into my personal bank and burn your paper"

Although the lyrics seem to rely on a large amount of free-association the passages can nonetheless be analyzed.

Goon does seem to have some linguistic knowledge in presenting a wordplay "Mandible like Canibus", referring to the root of the word for dog (canis), although it's unclear if rapper Canibus was intending to use the Latin dative ending, "going to the dogz", or if it was merely a cannabis reference.

Also in support, "pounds of fish" is likely a play on "pound of flesh", which likely references not only the Van Damme movie, but Shylock in Merchant of Venice, a play about medieval banking practices.

"bout" is contraction of "about", typically presented as 'bout (although the omission derive from the transcription.)

"Spitting jewels" refers to the rhymes and witticisms Goon promises to deliver in the pending lyrics. Whether or not they achieve the goal I leave to the listener to determine.

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It means what Snowgoons mean by it, in other words it isn’t a pre-existing phrase with a set meaning, at least it isn’t in mainstream use.

What I take from it is that he is equating the quality of his rhymes and flo with the quality of Swiss-made watches which have high caché and many jewels as part of their mechanics. But the lyricist may have a different frame of reference.

I guess that ‘wolves’ flows better than ‘jewellers’ but there is a history in literature of minority populations being referred to as wolves as seen in Arnds P. (2015) Gypsies and Jews as Wolves in Realist Fiction. In: Lycanthropy in German Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London

In nineteenth-century literature, the wolf metaphor undergoes a shift from its religious and moral contextualization to a paradigm by which the presence of minorities who were perceived as threatening to communities and the nation at large is fictionally represented. While Kleist’s invocation of the battle in the Teutoburg Forest has shown us the nation united against foreign invaders, some of the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, both in Germany and abroad, increasingly associate wolves not only with foreign invaders but also with ethnic minorities, specifically Slavs, Jews, and ‘Gypsies’

And Jewish watchmakers have always been a significant part of the Swiss industry, but I think any connection here is a stretch as the use of the term ‘wolves’ would then be derogatory, and the lyricist does not seem to have that intent.

The use of ‘wolves’ may be no more than a poetic term for people in Switzerland, arising from an association of them and wolves both inhabiting snowy, mountainous regions.

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  • Jewels as part of a mechanical process is quite insightful! I have no doubt the lyrics originators hold great admiration for Swiss timepieces as a symbol of status and success. However, I don't think the usage of "wolves" by the rappers would be pejorative. Predatory behavior is often lauded in the form, and the recent film "Wolf of Wall Street" demonstrates the desirability of the attributes and association in hyper partisan-contexts such as finance and the "rap game" Money, and taking other people's money, is definitely a theme in the lyrics.
    – DukeZhou
    Oct 31, 2017 at 19:26
  • I assumed there was a reference to the jewelled grills rappers wear on their teeth?
    – verbose
    Mar 12 at 7:45

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