A Year of Lil Wayne: Real Live Footage of Lil Wayne Teaching Monica to Skateboard

Day 189: "Just Right for Me" feat. Lil Wayne – Monica, CODE RED, 2015

Despite all the snarky comments that his skateboarding career has inspired over the years, Lil Wayne has in fact managed to emerge as quite an ambassador for the sport via pure visibility. I have no expertise via which to evaluate him technically, but as an uninformed person who has seen a decent number of skate videos, I think it's fair to say that Wayne has, by now, risen to the level of "not objectionable to watch." And the upside of that is we get a Monica video from 2015 in which the video treatment is basically: Monica hangs out at Wayne's skate park while singing about finding the perfect match. And then Lil Wayne teaches a very amused and slightly terrified Monica to skate, which is beautiful. This is a good video, and I approve.

It's also a good song, to continue our theme from yesterday of Lil Wayne hopping on R&B songs from 90s singers in the 2010s and delivering interesting verses. This is a tougher role than you might think—there are maybe five rappers who consistently manage to do it without sounding creepy or painfully out of place—and Wayne is at the forefront of the pack. Even on an appearance like this, where he could easily phone in a quick eight bars about love or sex or whatever, he pushes himself to be formally interesting, such as in this percussive, rapid-fire description of the end of a date:

He then pulls one of his favorite feature verse tricks and references his appreciation of the artist/track: "got Monica on my playlist and she on my bae list." What better way to set us up for the super solid Monica track to come? It's fun; it's playful; it's sleekly executed. This is why Wayne is on so many hit songs: He is great at stepping in and rapping like he's a jazz musician sharing a virtuoso trumpet solo. He accents the track rather than taking it over. He is a true musician in this sense, one of the leaders as far as recognizing the musical range a set of rapped vocals can have. I bet you weren't expecting to find that much poetry in a video of Lil Wayne helping Monica balance on a skateboard, but there you go!

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