A Year of Lil Wayne: "HollyWeezy"

Day 90: "HollyWeezy" – Sorry 4 Tha Wait 2 , 2015

I couldn't figure out the beat to this song, listening to it today. Was it a Drake song from a couple years ago? Young Thug? Travis Scott? Future? Who was Wayne taking that hook from? After googling a bunch and looking for whatever explanation I could find, I realized that I recognized the song because I recognized this song; it was actually Wayne's own hit (I'd even blogged about it when the video came out in April 2015, on the 20th—nice).

And with that in mind, I challenge you to name any other rapper whose biggest hit came out more than five years ago who wouldn't sound hopelessly and awkwardly out of place on this beat, using this sound. But Wayne can handle this more melodic, ambient, dreamy style as well as the cool kids of the day; after all, he invented it. And so we get this song, which I mistakenly until now did not recognize for quite the multi-part symphony that it is. First there's the hook, straightforward and simple enough to be catchy but also constantly propelling the motion of the song ahead, as if there is going to be some bigger hook right around the corner, when in fact the main exhibit turns out to be the relentless, similarly forward-moving verses.

Those unspool punchline after punchline, hinging on each little end of line transition to swing into a new idea. It's a trick that Wayne did for a long time in his best mixtape raps, too, and here he's managed to breathe new life into it by having the melody string ideas together. So we hear about cocaine as white as milk and how milk does the body good. We get the line "we think the Bible's a comic book," which sounds bad until you connect it back to the line before, which goes "what's in your pockets, what's in your pocketbook?" and realize that Wayne is referring to the thickness of his money: the thick Bible looks as thin as a comic book in comparison. (Nonetheless, I image Wayne's more religiously mischievous fans might enjoy the line standalone, and there's good reason to, whether you interpret it as the Bible being frivolous or as the Bible being a great action story—supernatural events, holy deeds, it's got it all!—or as someone who raps about being epic all the time taking inspiration from it. My point is that Wayne says such amazing things and conjures up such amazing images that you can spend forever finding unintended ways to enjoy them.) Anyway, that's the first verse of the song.

In the second verse, Wayne raps like there's a fire underneath his ass, which we find out, in fact, there is: "I was a match made in heaven when Hell was a pile of wood / I run through Hell with gasoline drawers don't stop tell the devil that God is good." And then just as an extra bit of icing on that cake (I know I'm mixing metaphors, but imagine the cake was in an oven powered by said fire and bear with me), Wayne adds a couple great standalone observations that just happen to cap off the whole rhyme scheme in a truly inspired sequence of a separate internal rhyme: "entrepreneur in a Bentley droptop Azure / vagina connoisseur out the hood." It sounds beautiful when he raps it, and you get to savor the image of how mad some Republican who runs some awful bank and calls himself an "entrepreneur" would be at Wayne stunting on him in a Bentley, as well as the delightful phrase "vagina connoisseur." High art.

There's another hook and then a bridge sequence that dreamily moves from a revisiting of the hook into a revelation that seems to float in from the back of your mind that "Hollygrove ain't far from H-Town," that "we used to drive back and forth with the work praying 'Lord please don't let this car break down.'" And then Wayne's verse bubbles up, out of the instrumental ether, like a verse on a Screw tape, as it were, in sharp rap precision. It's, quite simply, fucking awesome. It goes:

Bruh. Down to the fact that the phrase "chopped and screwed" is chopped and screwed. Bragging about drinking discontinued lean in a song about Houston, then shouting out the legends, Bun B and Pimp C. This verse is one of the best Houston tributes imaginable. It's beautiful. It even has a punchline about PT Cruisers. It also low key is the Houston verse that Drake has always dreamed of rapping (this is a cadence of Wayne's that Drake often uses when he's doing a "serious rap" section), which is satisfying to hear and in no way a jab at Drake. Honestly, if Drake weren't so nervous about always getting the credit all the time, he would pull this verse and fuse it, "Panda" and "Father Stretch My Hands" style, into one of his own songs.

Anyway, this verse is objectively perfect-sounding music, and it still leads into another awesome part, which is Wayne's wailing reminiscence of trips from Hollygrove to Houston. It's crazy to imagine that Wayne probably really was making trips with his Cash Money seniors as a teenager between the two cities with crazy amounts of drugs in their car because the music business was just that much looser back then. But whether the lines are really memoir or not doesn't matter. They are amazing, and it's so satisfying to hear Wayne croon-rap like this.

I think this song was sold wrong—the video, after all, is sponsored by WeedMaps.com and full of bad product placement—and the hook definitely made it seem less brilliant than it was. We shouldn't ignore what a glorious-sounding product we got, though. I know this is not something either artist would probably be exactly stoked to hear, but we basically got Wayne's version of a Young Thug song. That's cool as hell, and I, for one, hope we never for an instant forget how Hollygrove Hollyweezy is, particularly if that means we have to continue listening to this.

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