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Music

A Year of Lil Wayne: "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"

Let's listen to Wayne tackle some more Jay Z beats while we're just killing time.

Day 175: "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" – The Prefix , 2004

If you are one of the three loyal readers of this blog, you might have noticed I've been kind of loosely stringing together this series of posts about Wayne and Jay Z over the last few days. The idea is to be building up to a more thorough exploration of some key junctures in their relationship as frenemies. But this premise has also given me a very effective time-stalling technique as I've worked my way through The Prefix, which might be Wayne's most overlooked mixtape and thus is a fertile block of songs for developing quickly churned out blog posts. You can't even Google the lyrics to most of these!

Yet while slowly consuming these songs is kind of a stalling tactic for saying something more interesting about Wayne's relationship with Jay Z, it's almost a more effective path to truly understanding the connection between the two. Not only is it illuminating that Wayne made a tape mostly devoted to Jay Z instrumentals, it is, as I noted yesterday, a good opportunity to see how Wayne played off Jay's takes on these same beats.

In the case of "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," Wayne mostly hews to Jay's flow, instead switching the subject matter up to be about how a woman needs to "get that jerk off [her] shoulders" and get with Wayne. Then, quietly at the end, he makes the same claim that he would go on to repeat on "Bring It Back": "best rapper alive since the best rapper retired." Here he's quietly beginning to make his case, one song at a time, so maybe a quiet consideration of this project is in fact the perfect, uh, prefix to understanding where that case might be headed.

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