A Year of Lil Wayne: Fuck Tha World

Day 51: "Fuck Tha World" –  Tha Block Is Hot , 1999

What do you say?

How do you give voice to your pain, let it breathe properly, when your grief runs up against the limits of verbal expression? We don't have the vocabulary to articulate the loss of the things that make us who we are—whether it's our loved ones or our community or our very ideals. This is a song about that, about what happens when reality is worse than whatever language you can use to address it, when there is nothing left to say but fuck the world.

Make no mistake: The election of Donald Trump isn't just a dangerous mandate for every form of destructive hatred—racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious hatred, homophobia, transphobia, the list goes on—although it is that. It's a tragedy for all Americans. It's a defeat for anyone who believes in the American ideal that this country by the people is also for the people, a project for the collective good rather than the good of an egomaniacal elite. A Trump Republican presidency promises to erode practically every protection we've created for each other through our government: economic support protecting the disadvantaged from destitution, environmental regulation protecting our resources and health from pollution, financial regulations protecting us from dangerous business practices, equal rights. We created these things to help each other, and now a minority of the country wants to take them away to help themselves. Fuck that.

There are plenty of people who will tell you that things have always been this way, that this is just a confirmation of what we already knew. Which is true, to some extent. America has always been racist, has always been restrictive in whom it chooses to grant the rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has always been a country where selfishness has been rewarded. But fuck that, too. The explicit, modern, democratic embrace of extremism is a loss of something American, a repudiation of our long progress to overcome our worst legacies, and we need to mourn that. Be sad, and fuck cynicism.

Today we'll grieve. Tomorrow, we'll get back to fighting, because a presidential election is no reason to cede the progress that more than half of this country still believes in. We will find ways to strengthen the American fabric regardless of how our government chooses to come after women or immigrants or people of color or basic legal protections that apply to every single person in the country. We'll come back stronger because fuck complacency. But right now we can mourn. Because fuck it all.

"Fuck Tha World" is a pivotal Wayne song, one that I expected to dissect in great detail on this blog from the perspective of what it meant for his career, how it transformed him from a witty, talented kid into a full-fledged artist articulating the human condition as he mourned the death of his stepfather ("Dear Rabbit, why they have to kill Rabbit?") and said fuck when he wasn't supposed to. But art doesn't always wait for the right time to be understood; it takes on meaning when it's needed. It says the words we can't. It gives us someone at our side who shares our pain. Today, this song pushed its way in, never mind the full story. Fuck what's convenient.

The story Wayne tells on "Fuck Tha World" is a specific one: He talks about being robbed of his childhood by both losing his father to gun violence and being saddled with raising a daughter of his own ("Tryna put me, a child, on child support / and my own family try to deny me of what I do because I'm a thug and stuff"). He talks about witnessing drug addicts in his neighborhood and about teachers giving him a hard time. He talks about people close to him dying and about getting drunk to numb the pain. Yet all of this is also a general story, one about the many ways in which we might feel the world closing in on us and our inability to deal with it. "Give me a cigarette, my nerves bad," Wayne mutters at one point; "I just keep my head up and my nuts, let 'em hang," he says later. How do you handle pain? How do you protect your loved ones from it? You flail, you push it away, you say fuck it all.

Here, Wayne raps, "I try my best to make it through the night and live today / But I'm upset so I'm steady wiping tears away." It's a rare moment of vulnerability and candor for him, and it's not a note that people generally turn to him to hit. But it's the note for today, a day when there is only pain and sadness for what we've lost, fear for what's to come, anger at what has happened. We're not supposed to say it today either, but fuck the world.

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