A Year of Lil Wayne: "Like Dat"

Day 61: "Like Dat" –  The Dedication , 2005

Right after the interlude where Wayne talks about his deal on The Dedication is this little snippet of a song, which might be of particular note to certain rap geeks because the original is Stat Quo's "Like Dat," a minor Atlanta rap hit that came out under the aegis of Eminem on Shady/Aftermath. The song was produced by Em, so if hearing Wayne rap over an Eminem beat is the kind of thing that gets you pumped up, look no further.

On that note, an aside: I guarantee that even though most rap news bloggers haven't listened to this song in years if they've heard it at all, the presence of a new Wayne song on an Eminem beat would be treated as the news of the week. Appreciate what you have, internet, which is literally all of recorded music ever at your fingertips. We're always so focused on discovering new music, but there's so much great stuff that we already have and that remains, for all practical purposes, essentially undiscovered. I've mentioned before that one of the goals of this blogging project is to serve as a reminder of that very fact. So anyway, on the subject of this song being good, let us return:

Wayne makes quick work of the beat, basically just cruising through for one verse with precision rapping and a decent amount of quotables. Just this opening sequence sounds sick, the way he raps this brilliantly composed sequence of assonance totally matter-of-factly: "Modern day gangster / old school player / a fine display of greatness at its greatness / send an array of strays at any patriot."

This song is full of rhymes like these, which aren't so much impactful for what they're saying as for the way they make you admire the endless possibilities for inflection in the human voice. Another great example is when he quips, "no I ain't into coke but I have it / no I ain't into dope but I stock it." Wayne has always appealed to me for precisely this reason: There's a real thrill to watching him just play around with language and discover new things you can do with it. Wayne is like the Thomas Edison of the English language, constantly tinkering to move us forward as a society.

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