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Hasan Malik is a master of awkward moments and creating unnecessary pauses... being normal is so boring. Trust me I've tried being average it's just not for me. So please join in moments of awkward platypusness and itchy souls because it's good for your health. Random is the name of the game. Internet, Check ✓

Monday, July 18, 2011

Sorry 4 the Hate...


So maybe its because I'm silly...maybe I have way too much time on my hands...or maybe it's just the curiosity of my itchy soul. So I recently downloaded Lil Waynes new mixtape "Sorry 4 the Wait". Now before anybody decides they wana go in on how terrible Lil Wayne is to the music industry, please stop while you're ahead. Don't nobody care, seriously. We've all heard every bodies view point on the subject and the man is still a multi millionaire, which means people are still buying his music and supporting his work. Now I listen to Wayne, not because I like him, but because he amuses me. I find the things that he says humorous, and because I am an adult who can distinguish between entertainment and reality I don't think there's any problem with that. People who watch horror movies and violent action movies don't get criticized for it. Why? because there are ratings on the films and it's not meant to be taken seriously. The thing that does bother me though is the fact that this material although rated and regulated is still to easily attainable by young minds. Young minds who may not have that afore mentioned ability to differentiate between real and make believe.
So I've been listening to this tape for about a week now, and as far as I'm concerned it's a rather weak project. Sounds like Wayne made it in four days, no concepts behind it at all just his usual ramble bamble. I'd say out of 12 tracks there are really only 3 acceptable freestyles that could even stand alone as decent (only my opinion, please do not share yours because I don't care). So the problem accured when I was listening to the tape in my bed and happened to fall asleep. Man did I have some crazy nightmares. I can honestly say that Lil Wayne is responsible for the most evil nap that I've ever encountered...the only words that I kept hearing over and over were "Kill...Bitch...Money...Nigga...Fuck...Choppa". So I started thinking to myself, what is Waynes music actually made up of. I've long understood the formula to Waynes success. He rarely says anything new or inventive, he merely repeats the same lines in different creative ways. For example he says "It's a jungle out there bitch come and climb my tree" and then on the next song he says "Looking for a bitch to hop up on my totem pole" and there are countless lines that continue to refer to tryna get a woman to get on, climb up, and involve herself with a tree, pole, and any other long object that he can compare to his penis. And it's works! I'm not hating, simply observing.
So what I decided to do, which I now somewhat regret was to break down this mixtape and see if I could really figure out what makes it tic. If you remember the episode from the Boondocks where Huey decided that he was gona watch nothings but black television you'll understand what I was slowly starting to turning into.
Ok so this experiment was relatively simple, basically because I started getting really depressed halfway through and couldn't take it anymore. But what I did was listen to the mixtape over and over listening for all of the topics and key words that Wayne uses and I made categories and started counting. When people say that all Wayne talks about is "Money, Bitches, Murder, and Drugs" they are absolutely correct. Now I've come to the conclusion upon listening to the mixtape at least forty times, that if you took each one of those things out, the mixtape would be called "Sorry this Tape Doesn't Exist". So I'm gona break down my findings for you.
Basically I broke it down into seven parts. I went through the tape and counted every time Wayne said bitch, nigga, fuck, made a violent remark, spoke of drugs, bragged of his money, or made a sexual reference. This is what I found...

Sorry 4 the Wait

Bitch-80x's
Now to a rapper the word "bitch" is pretty universal so I wasn't expecting him to only use it when referring to women. Because when talking about men who you don't necessarily respect you might feel inclined to call him a bitch-ass nigga, which Wayne does very often. It was interesting though to discover when he would use the word "bitch" appose to the word "baby". Whenever he was talking about a woman who had no connection to him (i.e. your girlfriend, a random stripper, or a fortunate unfortunate groupie that he decided to take down), he calls them bitches. Like "I just got you bitch some knee pads" or "I just want the baddest bitch up in the world right here in my lap". These women mean nothing to him because he doesn't know them nor does he have any feelings towards them. But the women that he calls "baby" or "shawty" are woman that he's slightly more invested in. Perfect example listen to "Marvin's Room", the first thing he does is give this woman an identity "Dana". and of the 80 times that Wayne says "bitch" in the entire cd, he only uses it once on this track. And even when he does it's a term of endearment "that's my bitch" and other than that, he refers to her as "she", "baby", or "shawty". Leading me to believe that Lil Wayne knows the difference between building up a woman and tearing down a community of young queens...go figure

Nigga-83x's
The word nigga has been controversial for too damn long if you ask me. The lengths that we as a society have gone to try to bury the word have been ridiculous. But I've already spoke on that in a previous post...Here we have a word that Lil Wayne uses at least six times on each track. It's a word that refers to everything and nothing. Bitch niggas. My niggas, This nigga, Real niggas, All niggas. Wayne doesn't hold back when it comes to the N word. But then again there's really no surprise there, that's pretty much across the board with most rappers in Lil Waynes category (i.e. Gucci Man, Wacka Flocka, OJ the Juiceman).

Fuck-72x's
Another words that it seems like Weezy brushes his teeth with. At one point the F in Weezy F. Baby stood for fucking. So we know how loosely this words flows out of his mouth. It's actually funny that the word fuck appears in pretty much the first thirty seconds of each track. Usually coming in the form of "ain't nobody fucking with me". Ehh, it is what it is...fuck it.

Drug Reference-71x's
So we all know that Wayne enjoys himself his narcotics, so much that I was actually surprised that I didn't hear more drugs innuendo throughout the cd. Most of them were letting you know how high he gets, or how high he forces the woman around him to get, or how much he profits from getting his community high. He's clearly still promotes his styrofoam cup, just without saying it anymore, he just says "lean" now...progress I suppose.

Violent acts-165x's
So this category is the one if any that will be responsible for my carpal tunnel in years to come. Because apparently Lil Wayne KILLS EVERYONE...and whoever he doesn't kill he's got goons to kill for him. This tape is literally made up of line after line of choppers, gats, getting shot in the head, laying in pools of blood, wearing the color red, barrels with sweet potatoes on the end of them, friends walking around so strapped that it would appear that they just returned from Iran...so on and so forth. And all of that was in twenty seconds of a song. Lil Wayne even says that three words you'll never hear are come out of his mouth are "let him live". smh everybody dies...

Sexual Reference-123x's
So when he's not out killing EVERYONE Lil Wayne is apparently having lots of sexual encounters with numerous amounts of woman. Sometimes pleasantly and sometimes violently. I'm not quite sure if it's a hatred for women, or the urge or need to concur them. But he's clearly got an issue with them. Although he'll never kill one...unless of course if she happens to be a witness in one of his cases...then in that situation, sure off with her head. But this entire cd screams raped and abusive sex. There was one line where home boy said "the game is a bitch, hold her down and rape her"...I don't understand how this can possibly be acceptable. But then in the very next track Wayne repeatedly says "hit a bitch with a car bomb". So if he's not having sex with them, then women fall under the only other category that exist in Wayne lexicon...which involves him killing them in some way shape or fashion.

Money-50x's
Surprisingly on this tape one thing you don't really hear much of is the abundance of money Lil Wayne has spent, thrown in the air, or used to wipe his ass. My theory is that we all already know how much money he and his baby daddy has so there's no longer a need to advertise it on every song. I mean he'll occasionally mention that you ain't never seen a watch like this or this is a one in one and I'm the only one who got it type line. But rarely and I had to actually listen for them, they don't jump out at you anymore.

...so like i said this experiment was cut short mainly because I ended up like Huey after days of being exposed to the nonsense, I felt my brain cells slowly dying and withering. But there is one other subject that I would like to point out. We've all heard the homosexual accusations that have been thrown around the music industry, I just find it interesting that there are times when I'm listening to Lil Wayne and I'm tryna give him the benefit of the doubt, but then I'm like, damn son that was questionable. "I wish a nigga play, I'ma bust him in the ass. Say young money then fuck you in the ass..." 0_o

But there you have it, this is a long ass post I know, but I just wanted to make sure I shared my experience with you all so that you can maybe ask yourselves the same damn questions I've started to ask myself. If we took all of the killing out, and the violent sex, fuck, bitches, and drugs out of this mixtape what would be left?
But I wanted to be as unbiased as I possibly could be when entering this experiment and I had an eighth category. It was "Positivity", I didn't want to just do a post on how negative Lil Wayne was if there was even a glimpse of good on the tape, and the answer is...

Positivity- 3x's
Honestly on this entire mixtape which is relatively short for a Lil Wayne mixtape. "No Ceilings" had about 20 tracks and was 80 minutes long, and "Dedication 3" had about 35 tracks and was 77 minutes long. This one only has 12 and is a total of 42 minutes long (which is even more crazy now that I think about it, I don't say fuck 72 times in a week, let alone within a 42 minute time span...). And in the 42 minutes I only heard three positive things. And they were on the very last track which was his outro where he normally just rambles and thanks a bunch of people. But as he was going down his list, I heard him say that he's found a new hobby, and my ears perked up and I said "oh really?" Then he says "my children are growing they're healthy and intelligent" I'm like well that's pretty damn good, then he says "and shout out to my mom she's getting married and she's happy" and I was like wow. That's it, three positive things I found on "Sorry 4 the Wait". And it makes me wonder if we'll be even more "Sorry 4 the Release".

This music is fine as long as you know what it is and what it does. Problem is if someone is repeatedly telling our kids to kill, kill, kill, murder, murder, murder. How can we be surprised when they actually do?

I need to listen to something happy asap, signing off
till next time
stay random

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5 comments:

  1. Good post bro, i hppen to b a bigger wayne fan then u seem to be but i understand ur premise..Sum of his wrk is hit or miss specially wen he singin...my kids wldnt listen to wayne not until they understand the reality as u put it in ur post of wat hes sayin in his lyrics...U cant hwever knock his creativity n outside the box way of thinking thts wa draws me to his music i hppen to like the fct he cn say sck my dck 15 diff ways.. good job Haas

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  2. I was able to finished reading this from beginning to end and I can't. Agree more to everything you wrote. It is sad how rap music is not about way of teaching our community and his anymore.

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  3. Fantastic post. I agree with everything that you are saying. I admit, as a poet I am an extremely anti-lil Wayne fan. Although I have an immense respect for his hustle and work ethic.

    To me, I still cannot get over how much he ripped off Gillie but since nobody really knows this story anymore, I am talking about a tree that fell in the woods and nobody was around.

    I don't respect many so called artists( and I use this term very loosely in this case)because I see the algorithmically enhanced success. Google's success is based on Algorithms, formulas designed to reach equations. What you did was reveal a portion of his algorithm. Your a blogger, so you know about SEO. Most "artists" do the same thing. Even poets. Peep how Talaam created an algorithm for success and how many poets attempt to follow his formula.

    Success used to be about talents. Now, in a digital age, success is just like SEO. You have to find your formula, the right keywords, the right links, and the right content for your demographic.

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  4. I really respect this blog, I'm 16 yrs old and am fan of Wayne and I nor anyone else can argue that a good majority of rap and hip hop music isn't positive towards the community BUT the few songs positive are the ones that make you want to make a change... Anyways Wayne may say a lot of 'half-baked' statements/lyrics but you can't deny the fact that he is very creative and intelligent with sentence structures and the many literary devices he uses in his music, he actually teaches that you can say the same thing in many different ways (like you said) and shows that hes not a 'simple minded' rapper. Like you I find most of his lyrics humorous but I think that a lot of people my age find him so compelling, not by the big picture of his lyrics but the raw material within, like the 'dope' lyrics. But you sort if can't blame it all on him, or rappers period, for the lyrics because sadly that's obviously what people buy into and that's what they wanna hear, he just happens to make money off of it because he knows the right words to put to the right beat. I'm sure if society didn't demand it and expect it from rapperes maybe that could open a positive door to rap society. And also society is soo judgmental that people have to say certain things in the music industry just to stay at the top, but that's not always the real them it just the 'hustler' them cause i doubt he says that stuff around his children. But to me music is just a getaway, it shouldn't be a lifestyle.

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  5. Yo im not gonna sit on here and write some long message but i can totally agree with what your wrote, People make a valid argument Wayne is creative and at the end of the day his music sells.I think our real problem stems from the lack of parenting if parents actually sat down and taught a young man how to really be a man and mothers told there daughters there true worth they would understand these lyrics are not only unacceptable, but in the event that they really did want to listen to his music they would truly understand that his lyrics are simply lyrics and not instructions nor Guideline on how to live your life and have a fake portrayal of of how to obtain respect and be considered a real "Nigga" Your shit is dope and i hope u keep your head up and Keep doing your thing

    JOEY BLANCO

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