Lil Wayne is dead. Call this an appreciation.
Of course, Lil Wayne, the physical human entity composed of flesh and blood, is not really dead.
But Lil Wayne the rapper, the rapper rapper, the artist who achieved more in the interval 2005-2009 than you or I will probably achieve in the next decade, is long gone. In fact, this piece probably should have been written some time in 2009, or maybe at the beginning of the new decade, after the release of “No Ceilings,” Wayne’s last worthy release. Or else it should be postponed until the man’s actual physical expiration.
But I have to write this now, because I only realized what Wayne was really doing when he rapped last quarter, when I enrolled in English 206: Reading and Writing Poetry. Don’t worry, you won’t see any of my poetry in this piece. But whatever success I attained, I owe it in part to Wayne. And I owe it to any current or future 206 students, and perhaps to any nascent artists in general, to share what he taught me.
Don’t Believe Your Hip High-School English Teacher
Before we begin, let’s get one thing straight. Poetry and rap are not the same thing. The aim of the poet, as far as I can tell, is to arrange words in text in such a manner that anybody reading those words will feel something. The rapper’s aim is to speak words in a manner so uniquely their own that the listener is then struck by some feeling. For both poets and rappers, this is a non-trivial goal. But rappers who try to make poetry (Common) end up making really shitty rap. And anybody who tries to convince you that Shakespeare was really just the illest spitter of his day clearly hasn’t tried putting the St. Crispin’s Day speech over a Lex Luger beat.
But that very hard-to-describe phenomenon of artistic success – call it inspiration, the fruits of perspiration, the summoning of the muse – evolves from the same basic attitudes and mental discipline in both camps. And it’s these habits that allowed Wayne to achieve the greatest moments of artistic ecstasy seen in pop music since, I don’t know, James Brown.
The habits also contain a very basic lesson, one that everybody who wants to create something has to come to terms with at some point. For me it hit home around the time I got my first poetry assignment back: as far as the Work you’re making is concerned, You don’t exist.
The Out
“Who is Lil Wayne, really? Where did he come from?” Who cares? My guess is the real Wayne, that is, Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., died a long time ago, and for good reason. Undeniably weird-looking, fatherless, poor, too smart for a New Orleans public education – why wouldn’t that kid seek extinction? For reasons we will discuss later, we must put aside all the self-celebrating swagger we get in Wayne’s tracks. My theory is that the non-artist Wayne probably wanted to kill himself. And he did, just not by ending his actual life. If we don’t know who the real Wayne is (the same way we’ll never know who the real Bob Dylan is), then good for him. It means he’s won. It means his hard work has paid off. It means rap gave him the out he was looking for.
But what precisely is that “out”? Vaguely, it’s art. But what’s that? And how do you make it? Around like a century ago, another densely allusive weirdo posited that, as far as the artist is concerned, art’s creation is “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” This definitely makes sense for T.S. Eliot, the guy who said it, since he was a bigoted, impotent dweeb (and an astonishingly good poet) with good reason to want to shut his personality down. But it doesn’t sound right for Wayne.Rather than those cold, hard modernists, one most associates Wayne’s exuberant self-canonization with the personality-celebrating Romanticists, or Whitman’s multitudinous form-flaunting. But not so. Wayne is one of those figures people speak of as “breaking all the rules,” when in fact the opposite is true. If anything, Wayne stringently followed all the old rules, and made up a bunch of new ones too. By the time he hit his peak, there was no room left for Wayne the man. To misuse Eliot’s schematics, Wayne was a walking catalyst for the conversion of World into pure, beautiful Rap.
A Portrait of the Rapper as a Young Man
How did he get there? Wayne, like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, was honing his craft before you or I had figured out how to hold a juice box without getting sticky. Because of this, even by the time his first album Tha Block is Hot came out, Wayne had, at age 17, already developed the muscles needed to support one of the most distinctive, flexible deliveries in recording history. Throughout Wayne’s juvenilia and early journeyman work, you can hear Wayne expanding himself, taking on bizarre Latin-inflected Jay-Z flows, building songs around acute concepts and even elucidating entire cosmologies.
Take "Bloodline," off 500 Degreez, which shows Wayne stretching himself in all three directions at once:
The streets make the hustlersSee, too, how that epiphany comes back ‘round for you, swings you through the cycle again, so that you are no longer merely hearing Weezy’s world explained to you, but in fact experiencing it? It’s a fairly blunt example of mimesis in Wayne’s work, but an effective one. Keep in mind that this is a year before Wayne’s talent really exploded.
And when I say “talent,” I of course mean discipline.
(Note to 206 students: Buy into the belief, even if just pragmatically, that “talent” doesn’t exist).
If the artist makes art through a “continual extinction of the personality,” how is the personality kept at bay? By letting the work of art itself dictate its own existence. This dictation might over-simply be said to take the form of rules. In this respect, the artist’s only responsibility is to develop the skills, the muscles to keep up with the rules. By Tha Carter II in 2005, the rules were in Wayne’s blood. His verses were syllabically as close to perfect as possible. If two or 12 lines needed to match phoneme-for-phoneme, they did. If he had to ghost every third sixteenth note across four bars, he did. Weezy no longer had a choice. His tongue was a fucking metronome, but you’d never even notice, not with all those words rolling so trippingly off it.
“I say it’s enlightening” – Wayne as Recycler and Catalyst
Wayne’s knack (one he shares with John Donne) for yoking together disparate ideas through pure phonetic charisma is what critics and fans alike praised him for most during the TCIII-era boom. But that zany wordplay was always merely the result of each track's individual, independent dictates, derived from the instrumental, the chorus and some (perhaps arbitrarily-chosen) concept. It’s a well-known fact in the field that Weezy’s mixtapes are in general way sicker than his albums. One reason for this is that on the mixtapes, and also when featured on other artists’ singles, Wayne had even more guidelines to follow.
Rapping over a radio single released by some other artist, Wayne often begins by mimicking the original track's flow, tweaking the lyrics only slightly, before slowly diverging and growing into its own thing. Take Wayne’s astonishing"Seat Down Low" off Da Drought 3, in which he exploits and annihilates TI’s original single (“Beat Down Low”). He begins with a most minute alteration. Where TI began “I like my beat down low,” Wayne sets out “I like my seat down low”– and the rest of the track seems to rap itself – “ and my window slightly cracked / riding with a bad ho / and her girlfriend in the back.” After that first decision – the switch from “beat” to “seat” – each word grows out the word immediately preceding it, leading Wayne straight into an entire scene. From there, the lines build into each other on their own power, carrying Wayne “right to the top of the motherfuckin’ mountain” – where the track peaks, Wayne sputtering at an octave below his normal range. Wayne wastes no time searching for the “perfect” word (Note to 206 students: nobody who does that ever makes anything). He simply follows the rules until they lead him to the only word left.
(Note to 206 students: the rules will lead you to originality. Have faith.)
Or, for a 100% original Wayne track, take this morsel from "Dr. Carter" from Tha Carter III, which is sort of Wayne’s version of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.” It’s not a great Weezy song, but it clearly shows his attention to craft and subservience of self to form. After repeating a phrase in different conjugations Wayne explains why this is not simple laziness, but rather a technique...called recycling
Which, of course, he’s also demonstrating even as he explicates. Recycling occurs here because it is spoken of; it brings itself about. Wayne – his body and voice – he is only the catalyst.
What Wayne Talks About When He Talks About Wayne
Now, Wayne would never subscribe to the idea it’s not him giving birth to this stuff. He spends a lot of time on tracks throughout his entire career saying stuff like “I’m ME!” (“Three Peat,” TCIII). But he never really believed it in the sense of himself as a person, as the human formerly known as Dwayne, until 2009, which is when the music really started suffering. Part of it might have had to do with his jail time, or sobriety, or celebrity or simple age. But 2009 and beyond, Wayne reversed his process. He began constructing convoluted metaphors and similes imitating those for which he had been so praised just a year earlier, then tried to wrestle a flow around them. Wayne was letting his frontal cortex back into the equation, his actual personality.
But four years is an impressive stretch for anybody to keep themselves at bay. I struggled with it for just three months, and can’t confidently say I succeeded. (Note to 206 students: It’s okay if you suck at poetry). And even though the “real” Wayne wasn’t really present in himself to enjoy it, I’m sure it was the time of his life.
An artist friend I like and respect had a motto – maybe she borrowed it from elsewhere, I’m not sure – that went something like “execute your work or execute yourself.” What the motto doesn’t capture, and what Wayne has taught me, is that if you’re doing it right, you should be doing both at once.