A Year of Lil Wayne: Up Up and Away

Day 214: "Up Up and Away" – Tha Carter IV, 2011

Here's a bonus track to go with all of the week's weed songs, fittingly chosen because it was originally a bonus track on Tha Carter IV. I feel like you can trace the entire careers of guys like Hopsin or Logic back to a Wayne song like this, and it's exactly the kind of rapidfire, masturbatory exercise that totally falls apart in less capable hands.

What distinguishes this track from earlier Wayne songs where he just cavorts all over the beat is, in my eyes, there is less specificity to the punchlines. It's like Wayne has become more isolated from the world around him. Where in the past he might have bopped through these verses with scattershot references to a star player of a mid-market NFL team or a B-list actress or an old Jay-Z song, here his punchlines are more generalized, even though they remain witty and laced with double entendres: i.e. "I don't give a Hoover damn / man, I son all these niggas / they should have a stupid tan." It is as though, when it comes to rapping, Wayne has, as he says, "done did everything on my bucket list."

Nonetheless, if you want to go up up and away with Wayne, there are few better ways to do it than by trying to follow his quicksilver words as he pays tribute to partying and smoking weed here:

Beautiful. Seems like as good an excuse as any to get lifted this weekend, right? Right.

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