The excitement was because of the music Wayne had been creating away from his label during the break between Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III.
Prior to recording Tha Carter in 2004, Wayne purged himself of all of the unused lyrics he had written down. He carried a notebook into a recording studio, clicked record, then rapped everything in the book until there was nothing left. He put it all on one thirty-five-minute song called “10,000 Bars.” That’s a slight simplification of the process, though only barely. But that’s not important. What’s important is what it led to.
With no prepared lyrics, and with an idea not to write anything down anymore, Wayne changed everything. He still had the technical ability to rap, but in the absence of material to reference it became augmented: less burdened, more organic, weirder, more fun. He piled words and phrases up on top of each other, mushed together similes. He spent four mixtapes and twenty-five-thousand guest features practicing it. It was great, and unexpected, and enthralling. The only question was: Can he—can ANYONE—do anything like this on a proper album?
And then “A Milli” popped. And it was perfect.
The beat was magical and feverish and instantly intimidating. Wayne’s lyrical sprint, his utter disregard for structure or linear compatibility, was intoxicating. Together, they were massive. 50 Cent was the first guy who showed that a big mixtape buzz could be swapped out for a major record deal. Wayne took that idea and advanced it. He showed it could do that, but that maybe that wasn’t the end goal anymore, because rap was heading in that direction now, heading toward a weirdo bonanza and mixtape-as-a-model sound, because that’s where he was taking it, and that’s where it’s been ever since. Perfect examples of what Lil Wayne set in motion are Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” (2009) and Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in the Paint” (2010).
Kelefa Sanneh wrote this about Lil Wayne for the New York Times after watching him in concert in February of 2008, about a week before “A Milli” was released as a single: “Lil Wayne is at the strange, magical point in his career when popular acclaim seems like total freedom, when hyperjudgmental fans suspend judgment, willing to follow their hero wherever he goes, whatever he does.”
The goofy single “Lollipop” was Tha Carter III’s biggest commercial hit, but it had zero gravity. “A Milli” had the density of a neutron star; it pulled everything toward it, and then into it. Wayne had gone pop without losing any of his eccentricities, so he carried them right TF into the room.
♦
When the sales numbers for Tha Carter III were released, Wayne and his team were in Los Angeles. A celebration was ordered. Wayne never showed up. He spent the evening in the tiny recording studio on one of the buses they were traveling in. By the time the party was over, by the time the others had returned to the bus, he’d recorded three new songs. This is my second favorite Lil Wayne anecdote. My first is that Wayne wandered into a nightclub one evening not knowing he’d walked into a Stevie Wonder party and Stevie Wonder yelled at him for making too much noise. Stevie Wonder is the greatest.
♦
“Maybe you are the next Lil Wayne, but probably not, in which case you need to stay in school.”
That was Barack Obama, talking to a bunch of children at a campaign event in 2008. That’s how famous Lil Wayne was in 2008. He was so famous that the man who would eventually become the president of the United States, a country where we’re sold that anything is possible, was running around telling children that they should not dream to be Lil Wayne because it was too impossible.
Let us pretend that you and I have the ability to snatch up mini time periods of pop culture and claim them as our own, time periods that were enjoyable and impressive and that would be pretty great to experience absent of all of the work and hurt it (probably) took to create them. You and I, we will not take all of them, because you and I are not selfish. But we will have some of them, because you and I deserve them because we are good people and have never intentionally murdered anyone.4 May I please have:
Give me Omar Epps, 1992–1995: He had four movies during that time. There was Juice, which is as incredible and transcendent and still important and relevant right now. There was The Program, a fun and faux-serious movie about football that most people remember because there was a scene in it where the main players on the team lie down in the middle of a busy road just because. There was Major League II, the somehow not terrible sequel to Major League. Epps took over Wesley Snipes’s role for MLII, and he was the only person who even had a chance. And there was Higher Learning, an ambitious movie about race relations in America in the 1990s. He was a different kind of cool in each of them (Youthful Cool then Funny Sporty Cool then Quiet Sporty Cool then Angry Cool). I can’t even be one kind of cool.
Give me Jennifer Aniston, 1997–1999: This was the season four to season six stretch of Friends where the show had truly become something special, and if not “special” then at least “unstoppable.” Aniston as Rachel was the best member of the cast. Ross was fun but too annoying and goofy to want his spot.5 Chandler was too frustrating. Joey was too dumb. Phoebe was too aloof and long-necked. Monica was too anal and shriekish. But Rachel, she was perfect. She could do all the things the other members were best at, except she was just one person doing it. Maybe more important: Aniston’s hair was first class. She might’ve had the best head of hair for a decade straight. Do you even know how much easier your life is when you have nice hair?
Give me Manu Ginobili, 2003–2005:6 He won two NBA titles (2003, 2005), and those two titles made him a star in the league and a superhero in San Antonio, where he was the only Latino player on the only professional franchise in a city filled with Latinos. He won a gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, and that made him a legend in Argentina, where he is from. He won back-to-back Olimpia de Oro awards.7 And he got married. Do you know what I did from 2003 to 2005? I played a lot of Halo 2 and I tried to learn how to become a street magician.
But before I have any of those, may I please have Lil Wayne’s 2008?
REBUTTAL: “SWAGGA LIKE US” JAY Z AND T.I., FEATURING LIL WAYNE AND KANYE WEST
In no way should “Swagga Like Us” crack any top-twenty-songs list for T.I., Lil Wayne, Jay Z, or Kanye. But as a moment—the Voltron-ness of it all—its existence (and success) makes it the most important rap song of 2008. It’s a Kanye West production that samples an M.I.A. song (“Paper Planes”) that samples a song by the Clash (“Straight to Hell”) that went on to be T.I.’s fifth Paper Trail single (of eight total), one that eventually climbed its way to a Grammy performance (and a Grammy win) in which the four rappers exchanged their typical baggy fare for a tuxedoed Rat Pack look, all while a very pregnant M.I.A. bopped around stage in a polka-dotted bumblebee swimsuit. If you want to know what rap music and hip-hop culture were like in 2008, as well as where they were headed, it’s all there, inside ”Swagga Like Us.”
—REMBERT BROWNE
A Milli A Milli A
“I’m a Young Money millionaire, tougher than Nigerian hair” (0:24)
“Cause my seconds, minutes, hours go to the almighty dollar” (0:38)
“Got the Maserati dancing on the bridge, pussy popping” (0:48)
“I go by them goon rules, if you can’t beat ‘em then you pop ‘em” (0:55)
“Sicilian bitch with long hair, with coke in her derriere” (1:13)
“Okay, you’re a goon, but what’s a goon to a goblin” (1:25)
“Never answer when it’s private” (1:37)
“It ain’t trickin’ if you got it” (1:57)
“They say I’m rapping like Big, Jay and Tupac” (2:21)
“I don’t O U like two vowels” (2:39)
“Don’t play in her garden and don’t smell her flower” (2:59)
“Bitch, I could turn a crack rock into a mountain” (3:19)
“They don’t see me but they hear me” (3:27)
Boastful, Psychological, Hopeful, Insightful, Thrilling, Get Money, Descriptive
1. The most fun version of the story is that he was pretending to be Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. I suppose if you’re going to shoot yourself pretending to be a Robert De Niro character, Travis Bickle would be the one to go with. You certainly don’t want to shoot yourself being the Little Fockers Robert De Niro.
2. The inverse here is true as well: When he is too silly or trying to be too weird, when he decided to pretend to understand the guitar and accidentally recorded and released the emo rock album Rebirth, he is a mess and, worse, ignored creatively.
3. In the context of this chapter, Cash Money Records sounds somewhat small and somewhat unimportant. They were not. That’s where Juvenile and Birdman came from, and also the parent label that eventually delivered Drake and Nicki Minaj, too.
4. If you actually happen to be reading this book in prison under the weight of a murder charge, then I would like to extend the invitation to you to continue reading. I would also like to encourage you to strap this book to your body as armor in the event of a prison riot. It is hearty and thick and will serve as good protection. Good luck.
5. David Schwimmer, who played Ross, directed a movie called Trust that was released in 2010. It was about a fourteen-year-old who gets sexually assaulted by a man she met on the Internet who’d pretended to be a boy her age. I rented it blind when I saw that he’d directed it—he’d headed two movies prior that were lighthearted. I didn’t even read the description for it. I figured Trust was going to be fun and funny or at least one of those things. But it was not. It was super not.
6. I would just close my eyes very tightly for 2004, when Derek Fisher tore the Spurs’ heart from their chest with his so-fucking-terrible 0.4 shot in Game 5 of the playoffs.
7. It’s a sports award given out annually in Argentina and it is an important thing.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
It’s about a guy who likes a (lot of) girl(s), and a lot of time is spent reasserting his assessment of them.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It was the insta-start of Drake’s career, and Drake went on to widen rap’s purview by making it undeniably okay to rap about your feelings, and by actualizing the Internet to propel him to fame, when everyone before him had failed to pull this feat off.
It’s easy to make fun of Drake, and so a lot of people do that. Sometimes, even when you aren’t trying to do that, you still do that. The art for this chapter, it’s Drake doing pottery. It wasn’t meant as an insult, and it’s not an insult.
I told the illustrator, “Do something cool and something that Drake would do but that’s not rapping or rap-related,” and a few days later that picture was in my inbox. And when I saw it I said, “Well, that’s pretty perfect.” Drake probably doesn’t do pottery, but Drake might do pottery. Drake might do anything. It doesn’t matter what you say after “Drake doing . . .” There’s a possibility he’d do it, or has already done it, and that’s half the reason it’s funny, and the other half is because he’s Drake.
Drake riding a ten-speed bicycle.
Drake opening a ketchup bottle.
Drake shopping for a fern.
Drake making a Where the Red Fern Grows joke while shopping for that fern.
None of those things are insults, but they kind of are, but they’re definitely not. So Drake might do pottery. And if he doesn’t do it sincerely, he’ll (almost certainly) do it ironically. Because he’s funny and charming and transcendent, and sometimes only two of those things, and sometimes all three. When he was on Ellen DeGeneres’s show there was a segment where he read the side effects for an antidepressant drug in a sexy voice (funny). When he hosted the Juno Awards1 he did a thing where he hung out with old people and formed Old Money, a takeoff of the Young Money record label he’s signed to (funny and charming). When he hosted the ESPYs2 he blew into the ear of a basketball player named Lance Stephenson because Lance had done it to LeBron James a few months earlier in a play-off game (funny and charming and transcendent). Could you ever even picture one single other rap superstar blowing into Lance Stephenson’s ear, or that of any player from the Charlotte Hornets3 for that matter? No, you cannot. Only Drake.
Drake is a force. Drake is a force created by the Internet. Drake is a force created by the Internet and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak album and also some Andre 3000 verses. His first proper single, “Best I Ever Had,” was an instant success that verified his creative existence before he’d fully developed it.
Drake’s funny on “Best I Ever Had” on purpose, like when he says, “When my album drop, bitches’ll buy it for the picture / And niggas’ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for their sister.” And he’s funny on it by accident, like when he says, “I be hittin’ all the spots that you ain’t even know was there,” as though he’s discovered a new area of the vagina, as though he is the Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas.
Drake accidentally making a Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas joke.
♦
Quick stats: “Best I Ever Had” was nominated for two Grammys, and that’s crazy because it was basically from a mixtape,4 and so this is a really good example of how Lil Wayne turned rap inside out with his mixtape run from 2006 up through 2008. “The Best I Ever Had” rose to number one on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and also their Hot Rap Songs chart, which are two different things. It’s been downloaded from iTunes more than two million times, a feat more impressive than the (already impressive) number would suggest, given that it was easily available for free on the Internet.
♦
In the “Best I Ever Had" video, Drake is the coach of a female basketball team full of large-breasted women who are very bad at basketball and never ever wear bras. His team plays a game against what would appear to be a team of Amazons. And they get pummeled. With two minutes left in the fourth quarter and his team down 42–4,5 Drake calls a time-out. He brings his girls close, gives them a motivational speech, then sends them back out to finish the game in what is to be the most stirring comeback of all time. Except it never materializes. We see a shot of a girl on his team trying a jumper and getting it blocked, then the next shot shows thirty seconds left on the clock and now his team is down 91–14, and then the game is over. Four things:
1. Drake is not that great at rah-rah speeches. That’s surprising.
2. I don’t think I understand the rules of the Music Video Basketball Association, and I say that because as the aforementioned girl was preparing to take the aforementioned shot, she looked especially hopeful, a hopefulness that was matched only by dejection in Drake when he saw it get blocked. Nobody looks that irritated when a shot gets blocked unless that shot carries with it the potential to win a game. So I figure maybe she was shooting a 78-pointer, like from a special spot on the floor or something? That would have given her team a one-point lead. I guess it’s like MTV’s Rock N’ Jock basketball game, only except without Dan Cortese.
3. The Amazons scored forty-nine points in ninety seconds at the end of the game. That’s astounding. That’s the most dominant stretch of basketball that’s ever been played. The 2012 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team beat Nigeria by eighty-three points, and that’s the largest margin of victory in the history of Olympic and professional basketball, but even there their points-per-possession rating is way subpar to the Amazons. You can blame Drake for the defeat if you like, but that hardly seems fair. He was up against an unprecedented mismatch.
4. The song is all about the best girl(s) Drake has ever had. That’s the whole point. He’s so happy and excited about it. But then in the video it ends with him sad and alone in his coach’s office. The dichotomy would seem to serve as an indicator for the manner in which Drake navigates relationships, in that even when they are very good, they are also historically bad and unsettling. Which circles to:
Kanye West directed the “Best I Ever Had” video, and I’m happy about that because it allows for an easy transition to talk about 808s & Heartbreak, the album that West made in 2008 that was the template for
Drake’s professional angst, and also the (unintentional) permission for him to be able to pursue it, and not just to pursue but to be successful at it.
To be short: 808s was an album where Kanye, already a star, emoted for fifty-two straight minutes about the spiritual consequences of love, sometimes literally (there’s a song called “Heartless,” there’s a song called “Welcome to Heartbreak,” things like that) and sometimes aesthetically—the last three minutes and fifteen seconds of “Say You Will,” for example, there aren’t any words, just a couple of cold and lonely drums, two robo-tinks, and lots of chilled gray air to walk around in and explore your feelings. 808s wasn’t panned, but it wasn’t revered like West’s prior three albums had been.6 The quickest, best summation came when Jon Caramanica wrote “Drake took Mr. West’s self-examination and stripped it of all its agitation, preserving only the emotional turmoil” in the New York Times in September 2013.
There are parts of this book where conclusions and connections are made, where insight is developed or deduced based on evidence of observations. The Drake to Kanye (and Andre) thing, though, that’s not one of them. I mean, it’s an easy observation to make. But in this instance, there were no parts to snap together. Drake just said it:
“I think Kanye deserves a lot of credit and Andre 3000 deserves a lot of credit for the shift in what you have to be to be a rapper, and what your music has to sound like,” he told the Daily Beast in 2011. “Those guys made it OK for melody to be introduced. They made it OK to not necessarily be the most street dude.” It was a long interview. He clarified: “For me, I started to believe more in myself when I saw those two guys. I thought, ‘I’m good at rapping, so if they just respect the talent and don’t crucify you for what your past is or who you are, then I should be OK.’”
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 24