For a fleeting moment this past weekend, Willie Geist thought his street cred had gone up dramatically.
The TODAY anchor was hit by a blizzard of texts and tweets saying that he may have been name-checked on the new Kanye West album, “Yeezus,’’ which was officially released on Tuesday.
In the song, “I’m In It,’’ a line includes the lyrics “pop a wheelie on the Zeitgeist,’’ which some initially heard as “pop a Willie on the Zeitgeist,’’ and thought was a reference to a video blog on MSNBC that Geist used to produce called “Zeitgeist.”
After Geist was alerted, he quickly got to the bottom of the situation — but it turns out he's not as well known in the rap game as he thought.
“This weekend, I'm out with my kids, I'm getting emails and tweets going crazy saying, 'Oh my gosh, you got a shoutout on the new Kanye album,’’’ Geist said on TODAY Tuesday. “So I go (online) and a simple Google search reveals it has nothing to do with me. I can say definitively this morning, not only was I not shouted out, Kanye has no idea that I exist, and I'm fine with that.’’
The misinterpreted lyric also raises the question of what "pop a Willie on the Zeitgeist'' would actually even mean.
"I did that once, and it's not pretty,'' Al Roker said.