This Is Hooked on Phonics with “Every Girl” and Lil Wayne

Day 341: "Every Girl" – Young Money, We Are Young Money, 2009

There is every reason to believe that Drake's description of "she be jumping up and down, tryna fit that ass in / took her half an hour just to get that belt to fasten" is the line that made his career. After all, it's one of the most memorable lines on this song, which is essentially just a Drake and Lil Wayne song with a few Young Money goofballs attached and which blew the fuck up in the summer of 2009. I remember very specifically that Drake announced a tour with a video that had that line looping in the background, and I was immediately compelled to find out what it was. And finally, it's a distillation of Drake's fundamental appeal: He raps stuff that sounds appealing to dudes but that is empathetic and relatable to women.

There is also every reason to believe that Mack Maine's line "in about three years holler at me Miley Cyrus" singlehandedly engineered Miley Cyrus's urban radio transformation. But that's a whole other discussion.

What I'd really like to talk about is how Lil Wayne singlehandedly proved every doubt about Auto-Tune wrong with his declarations in this verse, a wildly swooping and gurgled performance that somehow drifts from straightforward objectification into genuine romance. Look at this quatrain, one of the finest in Lil Wayne's career:

How did this guy go from making a literal dumb joke about being good at sex into making a punchline about Hooked on Phonics to turning it into an actually beautiful sentiment? All while sounding bionic himself? Your guess is as good as mine. There's no logic for this, but I hope that when all is said and done, the fact that Lil Wayne managed to get from "hooked on phonics" to "I think you're bionic" to the pure thought of "And I don't think you're beautiful, I think you're beyond it"—a line to remember and drop on someone you really care about if I ever heard one—in three lines deserves to be in some kind of hall of fame.

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