A Year of Lil Wayne: An Appreciation of Lil Wayne's Monologues

Day 195: "Cops Is Watchin" – Da Drought, 2004

"It's real—like a hundred degrees right now. We workin' at a hundred degrees. We trying to get all the way back up to 500. My brother put out 600 Degreez, so I guess I'm gonna work all the way up to seven."

Increasingly I find a lot of satisfaction in Wayne's monologues on his projects, especially his mixtapes. They're kind of an outdated format, presumably in part because people just can skip them now or won't even go to them because they just play one song off of Soundcloud. That's too bad because there's so much good shit hidden in these random spoken interludes, even when it's just kind of vague inspirational platitudes. I guess those all exist on Twitter and Instagram now instead. But in that context they don't feel like part of the oeuvre, and definitely one appeal of the oeuvre is the way that so much of boils down to Lil Wayne telling you how great he is and then proving how great he is at the same time. These days, all the telling happens outside of the music, which also probably creates more pressure for the showing on the music.

This song appears later in a slightly different form, without the monologue, on Tha Carter. I wrote about it briefly but didn't take much time to comment on it. So since there's another chance, I'll mention that one thing I like about this song is that Wayne's voice and cadence sounds a bit like he's borrowing from T.I., which would make sense. "Rubber Band Man" would have been all over the radio when Wayne was recording this, and that song rules. No wonder Wayne was compelled to play with a similarly bouncy flow.

In particular, I love this little run, where the emphasis ricochets all over the syllables, propping up internal rhymes and abrupt about-faces that all lead up to a spot-on pop culture reference about his own brilliance (and how tiny he is). This is really Lil Wayne in a nutshell. This is like watching Kobe drive to the basket: methodical, controlled, yet unpredictable and otherworldly, just a pristine skill that nobody can diminish and that he can repeat a thousand times over:

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