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Music

A Year of Lil Wayne: "We in the Scene"

Let's hear it for great mixtape rap.

Day 105: "We in the Scene" feat. Young Yo and Gudda Gudda – SQ1 , 2002

Who are the great remaining mixtape rappers? Today rap fame is found most reliably through polish and marketing, and the idea of making music that's a little rough around the edges, that exists just for the sake of cleverness instead of some grand statement, appears to be in decline. You have 19 year olds now who are piecing together ambitious "projects"—mixtape would be too pedestrian, not to mention too liable to get cease and desisted off the internet. There's little of the raw thrill of the towering tapes of the early to mid 2000s, when you had guys who had little pretension at making grand artistic statements but who just happened to be friends with the guy at the center of things hopping on tracks and doing their damnedest to demolish the beat in question.

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Thus one of the triumphs of Sqad Up, a group that is great because of Lil Wayne's exertions but is what it is because of the full complement of guys involved. After all, a song like "We in the Scene" might be awesome even if it were just Wayne rapping for two minutes straight, but the fact that he's preceded by short, swaggering verses from Young Yo and Gudda Gudda makes his arrival all the more satisfying. When Young Yo brags about all the big boy shit he does, including pull up "with some lil boy['s] bitch," we're thrown into the right mindset. When Gudda Gudda quips, "stay in your place or get murked / unless you want your motherfucking face on the front of a shirt," we pause to acknowledge the satisfaction of hearing the right syllables slide into place, of rap that is just flat-out well constructed. These days, we're so precious about every song having to say something or so flippant about what it takes to record a song that there's little room for the friend who comes through with a hot eight bars and just wants to talk some wild shit. What a bummer.

And then we have Wayne, who appears with the same nefarious energy as his friends but a more mischievous world view and truly prodigious talent. He boasts that "pop stars gave skull but I won't say"—remember, this is Wayne at 19, still a pretty obscure regional rap star—and he sets up the most satisfyingly poetic series of internal rhymes you will ever hear about killing someone and then coming on a girl's face:

For whatever it's worth leave a nigga face first on the surface
Burst in bitch face first on purpose
Shit squirt all in her smirk
Lay good dick work all in her skirt
Make mami hip hurt walk with a twerk

And wait! That's not all! Then he injects new cadences into the track by drawling, "boy from the durrr south talk with a slurrrrr / yes sirrrr / Young Weezy on furrrr." He makes a tasteless but brilliant OJ allusion when he talks about getting drunk and wanting to have sex: "vodka and OJ got your boy feeling like OJ / put on a glove and stab something." This song is Wayne's playground because it's never treated as anything but that. It's just a chance to rap, and man does everyone involved take advantage of that chance.

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