A Year of Lil Wayne: Let's Talk About Rick Ross's Birdman Diss

Day 179: "Nigga Couldn't Know" feat. Lil Wayne – Big Tymers, I Got That Work, 2000

"I pray you find the kindness in your heart for Wayne / his entire life, he gave you what there was to gain."

That's Rick Ross, on his new song "Idols Become Rivals," which is about Birdman. It begins, "I grew up on that Cash Money / bling bling, was well known to flash money" and then descends into shot after shot about the way Birdman has mistreated those around him.

It claims, among other things, that Birdman's watches were fake, that he never owned his expensive cars, that he has failed to pay producers, that he has taken advantage of his artists in a way that is morally equivalent to the pedophile Catholic priests, that he stole their publishing to buy a house, that he is abusing cocaine and heroin, that he has failed to visit BG in prison or even buy Turk dinner since Turk returned from prison, that he did something horribly disloyal to DJ Khaled, that he got one of Ross's friends sent to jail, and that he managed to make half a billion dollars and still leave his "team starving." Many of the lines are jaw-dropping and double take-inducing. It is absolutely one of the most devastating diss records I've ever heard.

It is more powerful because Ross didn't make a particularly big deal out of it. This is not a celebrity point-scoring publicity thing (like, ahem, some MMG-Cash Money politics); it appears deeply and genuinely motivated. To those of us watching from the sidelines, it basically came out of nowhere, as a deeper cut on an underhyped album rather than as some sort of much-hyped event record (to be fair, he'd been sharing his anger toward Birdman for a while). Ross dropped the opening salvo on Instagram, writing, "The Level of respect and Love that I have for WAYNE makes it hard to sit back and not speak on the situation.The streets need you.Being a Boss means having the courage to say the things everybody thinking but scared to say.I can't wait for you to hear it." This, in turn, prompted Wayne to respond on Twitter, "dam big bro that msg hit me in the heart and put the motivation on automatik start. I needed that. 1 boss 2 another."

We know Wayne has been hurting from his legal battle with Birdman, but there's a complicated dimension to it given that Wayne's portrayal of the situation is necessarily clouded by his extreme closeness to it. Birdman is, essentially, Wayne's father, having had a hand in basically every aspect of Wayne's life since he was a tween. Thus, Wayne has generally come at the dispute on record with more of an emotional plea rather than with a laundry list of crimes. Ross's detailed charges and his own claims that Birdman let him down are, in a way, more devastating because they have more of a veneer of independent authority.

They're also devastating because they ring so true. Birdman has long had a reputation for not paying producers, and Lil Wayne is literally suing him over unpaid royalties. As Ross says, his own career with MMG is modeled on Birdman's, and the way he takes this personally seems to suggest that he understands the cruelty and absurdity of denying signed artists their publishing. And the specificity of it—from Birdman buying Scott Storch's house with his "demons in it, which is more poison" to Ross going on the LiveNation tour when he realized Birdman's watch was fake—makes it hard to refute. And jeez it just continues to be so scathing! What about this part?

If you're keeping count that's one of at minimum two and possibly more insinuations that Birdman is lost in drugs (the other obvious one is, "shootin' dope, usin' coke, movin' like you the folks") and one of at minimum two that Birdman doesn't pay for the shit he claims to own. Honestly, we could keep going. But the point is that everyone—Wayne, BG, Turk, Mannie Fresh, DJ Khaled, Scott Storch, the various producers who have worked with Cash Money, Ross's friends, Ross himself—has been fucked over by Birdman, despite the many, many things they have done for him, and this extends well beyond Wayne's personal crusade to get paid. Although, as Ross says, the fact that Birdman built his empire around Wayne and gave him nothing is the most heartbreaking part.

There's clearly even more going on here than those of us outside the situation can understand, but even on the simplest level, Birdman and Rick Ross are two of the only truly larger-than-life characters left in music (Birdman via actually being out of control and Ross through a combination of actual successes and smart branding), so to have them go at each other is a big deal. What will come next is hard to say. Birdman told Billboard today, when asked about the song, "I don't get caught up in hoe shit, man. I just keep doing what I'm doing and keep pushing. I don't get caught up in that, I don't play like that. I'm a man and I stand my ground and I do my thing. Numbers don't lie, and that's all I give a fuck about: numbers, and puttin' them up."

But at the very least, Ross seems to have won a huge moral victory for the side of Not Birdman, and the cards seem to be stacking more and more against the Cash Money boss. Perhaps the momentum is shifting toward us getting a fully realized, free, and untroubled Wayne before the end of the year. Wouldn't that be nice? Until then, free Wayne and Mannie Fresh. Here's a song from simpler times, when Birdman bragging about coke and cars was inspiring to Ross instead of a reminder of all the charges Ross had to level against Bryan Williams:

Photo: Screenshot of Rick Ross on Instagram

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