A Year of Lil Wayne: "No Lie" and a Few Truths

Day 125: "No Lie" –  Dedication 4 , 2012

In the whirling maw of the vast garbage disposal that is national politics mixed with the meme economy, this past weekend was a busy one. We entered several new versions of untruth into the lexicon as Donald Trump and his team lied their way through discussing crowd size at the inauguration and introduced us to the nonexistent idea of "alternative facts." So today, in the spirit of truths and lies, here is a song called "No Lie"—it's Lil Wayne's freestyle over Drake and 2 Chainz's flawless original—and some thoughts about what is true, or rather how we tell the truth.

Now, this is not a Lil Wayne song anyone is really tuning into Lil Wayne to hear. His best line is, "Trukfit T-shirt, blunt dipped in syrup / pass that weed around like some fucking hors d'oeuvres," which doesn't really rhyme and also rehashes the already-existing joy of hearing Wayne rap "fucking hors d'oeuvres" to diminished effect. Which raises the question: Why did Lil Wayne, the best rapper alive, the kind of guy who could shit out verses more elaborate than a rap battle between Rakim and Shakespeare, get so bad at rapping around 2012?

Here's my theory: In the last few years, as rap has become more central to the pop narrative and enjoyment of rap has become more intertwined with participating in it via social media, landing a successful bar has become more and more about pithiness. While rappers used to be lauded for the way they might build an entire verse-long argument (I'm thinking of the famous Phonte verse where he "got your head still bobbing and my verse didn't rhyme"), now it's about getting off a line that makes a good Instagram caption. Although Lil Wayne, as the pre-eminent pop crossover artist, is partly responsible for this, his style of punchlines piled on punchlines is not necessarily suited to it, as Drake's (and Kanye's, for that matter) gradual usurpation of his place has shown. Wayne's a bit too weird for the type of vague declarations that work in this context; his best lines are often the ones that don't make much sense out of the world of his own life. As usual, he was smart enough to have recognized rap's shift in this direction. And, as it happens, he was also probably bored enough of rapping circles around every "I'm the shit" punchline combination available that it made sense to try something new. But acknowledging the shift and smoothly adapting to it are two different things.

And so you get verses like these (or his stilted feature on "The Motto"), where he is going for that simplicity (which, oddly enough, he has no problem achieving when the intent seems less tryhard) and instead just throws up a bunch of images that no one really wants to imagine. The beauty of lines like "You know I'm nasty, excuse my behavior / let me just taste ya / we can fuck later / sitting in the coupe, looking like a racer" is that they arrive fast enough and with enough rhythmic flare in the delivery that you're not left actually picturing each act. Meanwhile, emphatic pauses when you're just rapping about poop and sex don't do the subject matter any favors. Lil Wayne's martian sensibilities aren't suited to an era of peak literalism. He doesn't need to lie, but he does need you to suspend disbelief, to not take every metaphor at face value. "No Lie" is accidentally a pretty literal song: It encapsulates Wayne's challenging relationship with being straightforward, for better and for worse.

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