Math is a beautiful, infuriating thing—especially for a sports and pop culture blog—but there are just some times when we have to give in, break out the TI-89 calculator we’ve kept since high school and crunch some numbers.
One post on Reddit’s r/Music board late Thursday night immediately sent us scrambling to do just that. You see, while the rest of the world was busy watching Duke keep Coach K’s last dance alive a bit longer, Redditor u/randomvegasposts was pondering one of life’s great mysteries:
How long will it take OutKast to actually apologize to Ms. Jackson a trillion times?
God bless Reddit pic.twitter.com/i2cD6W20Nm
— Tim Dwyer (@T_Dwyer) March 25, 2022
Got the song stuck in your head yet? Good. Now let’s dig into the question.
Released in October 2000, André 3000’s partial ode to Erykah Badu (and her mother) apologizes to Ms. Jackson 20 times in the lyrics. As u/randomvegasposts noted, the song would have to be played 50 billion times in order to reach one trillion apologies.
According to the post, u/randomvegasposts counts 621 million plays on Spotify, which accounts for 31 percent of all streams on the current market. That leads to an estimated 1.863 billion plays. Adding in YouTube streams and record sales from “Stankonia”, u/randomvegasposts brings the estimated total up to 45.9 billion apologies.
But it gets more complicated because the internet in the early aughts was anything but simple.
With file sharing apps like Napster, LimeWire, Kazaa, Morpheus and tons of others at their peak, it’s impossible to tell how many times Ms. Jackson was pirated and played. Having grown up during that era, I can confidently say we can only underestimate this number.
So let’s consider this a different way. If we know it takes 50 billion plays to reach a trillion apologies, and the song itself—at normal speed—is four minutes and 30 seconds long, we would need to play Ms. Jackson on a continuous loop for 427,798.323 YEARS in order to fulfill André 3000’s promise.
Of course, Redditors have a few other ways of complicating this question. Let’s say you’re singing along with the song, do those apologies count as well? Or is it only André 3000’s vocalized apologies that matter here?
If André 3000 is singing in past tense, does that mean he has already hit a trillion apologies?
Does recording an apology and playing it back over and over count as multiple apologies? Or is André 3000 still stuck at the original 20 apologies in the lyrics when he recorded his part? And if OutKast had to record multiple takes in the studio, do those apologies count or are they unofficial?
The mind boggles. More specifically, the minds of all the sportswriters in our Slack Teams channel boggles. We were not built to deal with numbers these large.
The only obvious answer here is that it’ll take forever. Forever, ever.
