A Year of Lil Wayne: "I'm Gangsta"

Day 112: "I'm Gangsta" – SQ1 , 2002

After a week of discussing SQ1, it may just about be time to move on, but there's no way to do that without first touching on "I'm Gangsta." While most of the tape is Wayne proving that he is a big league, real-deal rapper, as worthy of recognition from the East Coast gatekeepers as the artists who made the songs he raps over, there's not a ton to unpack, thematically. But "I'm Gangsta" does offer an awfully candid portrait of what Wayne is looking to accomplish, on multiple levels. Wayne has always had a complicated relationship with the various identities he's had to juggle, and this song is a good example of him looking to come to terms with them.

As a member of the Hot Boys, Wayne was an inherent contradiction: He was both a child star who didn't curse on songs and part of street rap group. He grew up around real-deal gangsters and dabbled in their world, but he also was positioned to be a pop star in a way that his fellow Cash Money artists were not. Wayne has continued to wrestle with these countervailing forces for years, rapping about guns constantly but also claiming that the only time he shot anyone or was shot himself was the time as a kid that he pointed a gun at himself in the mirror and it went off accidentally. Here, he even muses, "I probably'll never kill nobody but I pointed the pistol." That's not to say that Wayne should have shot someone—I'm relieved he hasn't—but rather that he's always come from a confused place as far as balancing who he is with where he came from along with what he has been a part of at various points in his career. On "I'm Gangsta," he muses, wistfully, about being "far from home, I still feel so hood" and then reflects on how his music has grown up since Tha Block Is Hot, released three years earlier.

We see that a few ways: First, there's the relaxed, bragging flow at the beginning, where he says that he can "handle the whip like Andretti / and I handle a bitch like my man Nelly" before losing interest in the punchline—presumably it's too easy—and mumbling "mami gotta go down down baby til I uh uh ya know." He also talks about his "rainbow Lambo," which is great. Then in the third verse he takes stock of what he's become, even as he dismisses the idea that he would actually end up having to shoot someone or sell drugs. Naturally, it's rapping full of internal rhyme: "And I know you never say never but whatever / I never felt better than now / I'm 19 and i'm a veteran now." He continues:

Remember those contradictions we talked about earlier? Even though Wayne is musing on how much of a gangster he is or isn't, he's well aware of how he's seen, by virtue of his youth, as just another rapper in the list of child stars like then-newcomers Lil Romeo and Lil Bow Wow. Obviously, that's a problem when you are on the warpath to show that you deserve to be in the same lineage as Jay Z, Nas, and Cam'ron (which, remember, is the main argument of this tape). So he dismisses his "peers" in a way that is worthy of those established guys, not only by throwing the facts out there that prove he's better but by undercutting Romeo and Bow, pointing out that he has nothing against them—in fact, his four-year-old daughter is a fan (subtext: they make music for children)! This is—not so much on technical or otherworldly talent levels but more on a clever rhetorical note—one of the most effective moments of establishing his claim to great rapping in Wayne's whole discography. To quote Wayne, "the flow deserve an ovation clap your hands to it."

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