We’ve watched him grow up in the spotlight, but we won’t ever truly know him. He is, on some level, emotionally available, just maybe not in the way his fans would like him to be. He says what he feels in interviews, even when it makes him look bad. Wayne is a dense, often subtly personal writer. There’s a timecode at the bottom, as if it’s a rough cut. The video is low-budget, just Ja Rule and Wayne exchanging joyful verses and weird leg kicks on top of what looks like one of those double decker tour buses as it circles New York aimlessly. Hell’s risen/ Call me young Raekwon, I’m a chef in Hell’s Kitchen/ And flow, sweet as devil’s food, I eat angels for dinner/ Call me what ya want, I don’t give a finger in the middle/ I’mma hold it down and blow up, the anchor is the missile/ When I say we got them brrrrrr! I ain’t trying to whistle/ Longbody Maybach, it make me feel so little/ I’m ballin on the suckers and I won’t pick up my dribble/ Retarded on the beat, I spit hospitals.” “Weezy F is in your building, I will step on your building/ From the steps, of my building, raise hell. It is, nonetheless, a very good track: Ja Rule melds his growl to the stuttered beat, which sounds like a robot on the verge of breaking down, his voice is the show and the spine all at once, but then Wayne comes in: His threats sound like the harsh reality of grudging acceptance.Ī year or so after the non-release of I Can’t Feel My Face, Lil Wayne popped up on Ja Rule’s “Uh Ohhh!,” a track that sounded like a Timbaland cast-off which was ushered into the world to salvage the public’s waning interest in Ja Rule. Only Wayne could write such relatable nihilistic exhaustion because the violence of this world is just too much, over a beat that sounds like it was stitched together with a watery guitar sample taken from a 128 kbps mp3 downloaded on Napster in the late ’90s. How could Wayne, an annoying, brilliant, and difficult rapper hate the place? The outrage was implied in the coverage: Hearing Wayne denounce a city he’s not even from and never really lived in shouldn’t have been too big a deal, but this is New York, and New York prides itself on being annoying, brilliant, and difficult.
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Wayne’s response? “Flat out, I don’t like New York.” It came up because of the beef (which, thanks to the internet, had escalated into a way bigger deal than it needed to be), but it was also because, earlier that year, after performing “Uh Ohhh!” with Ja Rule at the Beacon Theater, both rappers got arrested on separate gun charges that would ultimately land Wayne in jail, giving him the chance to sober up and write a prison diary/ pseudo-meditation on what it means to be locked up and famous. Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg claimed that Nicki Minaj was not real hip-hop (the most classic of Old Head New York Rap Arguments), so she canceled her Summer Jam performance in retaliation.
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It was 2012 - a particularly bad year for Wayne and New York City. We know this because he has said so in the most undeniable terms possible.