Seventeen years ago this week, Juvenile released “Back That Azz Up” (or “Back That Thang Up,” if you were a baby trying to make babies on the dance floor of a high school gymnasium). The descending chords in the intro cause an immediate Pavlovian response. Men crane their necks like gazelles hearing a rustle in the tall grass, and women ready their stances for the possible lone pity twerk they’re willing to give up for the evening. But what makes this song so awesome is that not only did it become the urtext for all future twerk songs, but it also introduced the world to Lil Wayne.
Sadly, Dwayne Michael Carter is fast on his way to becoming uncompromised, unrecognized and unparalleled at the ripe old age of 33. Since his prison bid in 2010, Lil Wayne has suffered a steady decline, which has included Empire levels of absurd drama. Wayne has dodged a tour-bus shooting, survived airplane seizures and been embroiled in a much-publicized contract dispute with “his daddy,” Bryan “Baby” Williams, aka Birdman. Sadly, like Empire, the over-the-top situations haven’t made people pay much attention lately.
The dispute with Baby, which has apparently been resolved, has limited Wayne’s ability to release a proper album, but his spiral into irrelevance is nonetheless disheartening. If you’re not aware, or are simply praise-stingy, Lil Wayne is a hip-hop legend. He’s been around for nearly 20 years; he made a successful turn from teenybopper to adult rapper; he has one, or possibly two, classic albums (depending on whom you ask); and he’s directly responsible for the careers of both Drake and Nicki Minaj.
Wayne is the Michael Jackson of hip-hop. Hyperbole aside, Wayne was plucked from the Hollygrove projects in New Orleans as a preteen, performed as part of a group under the tutelage of a “daddy” with animal-like features (Joe Jackson equals angry cat; Birdman equals self-explanatory) and subsequently sought out juvenile activity to fill a gaping hole inside because of a missed childhood.
While Wayne’s irreverent squealing can’t compare to the beauty of Michael’s voice, this man and his art should be more prominent in the hip-hop zeitgeist. Drake, Kendrick, J. Cole, Future and Kanye are the names most bandied about in discussions about the current top tier of prominent rappers. The first four names are part of a different generation from Wayne’s, but Kanye, his contemporary, provides a more apt comparison when discussing influence on the hip-hop world.
Objectively, Kanye has not put out a hot album since 2011. I had to take a moment to self-flagellate with my headphone cable for even allowing that truth to be written, but it’s true. Since Watch the Throne, there’s been a series of great one-off songs peppered between half-finished concepts, dated unreleased tracks and “f—k it” bars. Yeezus and The Life of Pablo could be condensed into a 10-track album, while the songs “Send It Up,” “Freestyle 4” and the remaining basura tracks could be repurposed into GarageBand Apple loops for underprivileged struggle producers.
Even though the work has been spotty of late, Kanye has built up enough cachet that being a Kanye apologist is almost a political statement. We’ve got to create space for our greats to stumble into mediocrity just like white artists do. Well, I’m here to cape for Lil Wayne because he is just as important in the transition from Jay Z to Drake as Kanye West is, despite not fitting a middle-class ideal.
In addition to being in the “featured artist” Hall of Fame with Ludacris and Busta Rhymes, Wayne’s biggest contribution to the current crop of millennial rappers is wordplay. Wayne popularized free association and relentless puns in a way that made you listen to the structure of the bars themselves more than the subject matter. This—coupled with his warbling, kinetic flow—gave his songs energy and a quotability that are tough to match.
They also gave his songs close-listen replayability. Because of Wayne, good lyricists are more prone to include clever, eyebrow-raising nuggets than simply beating you over the head with a charter-school vocabulary test. J. Cole, Big Sean and his protégé Drake all use this style, but through the melancholy, Uber-ride-home lens of 2016.
Despite being rich for most of his life now, Wayne still represents a Southern gangster underclass that doesn’t mesh with modern hip-hop. He can’t gain the cultural clout of a middle-class, artsy Chicagoan or even a New York gangster-turned-art-collecting businessman. Considering that Wayne was raised without his real father, lost his stepfather to violence, accidentally shot himself in the chest at 12, dropped out of high school at 14 and has only ever rapped for a living for 20 years, I’m more than impressed with the artistic risks he’s taken.
Rebirth? Trash. But attempting to learn the guitar? Worthy of respect.
Skateboarding? I, too, picked Kareem Campbell in the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but the second I fell? I quit.
Collaborations? “Motivation” should win the rap/sung collaboration Grammy into perpetuity.
Fashion? OK, maybe this is unredeemable.
Zebra leggings aside, these are all risks that, with the proper support, probably could’ve been much more successful. Kanye has taken similar steps in his career that have been lauded critically, and I can’t help wondering, if Wayne had finished high school, or was from the North, or just had a mentor other than a man with a star tattoo on his head, whether he would’ve had the wherewithal and network to bring his ideas to fruition. (I’m still holding out for a Lil Wayne-and-Kelly Rowland slow-jams album.)
This year, Wayne only scored an adjunct Grammy nomination for “Truffle Butter,” but he did manage to keep his profile up by appearing in a Super Bowl commercial cradling some of his famous apple pie.
This special relationship with pie is one of his most important contributions to the culture.
I remember being an oversized-Tims-wearing youth and hearing DMX say, “Make you want to eat bitches, but not me/y’all [n—gas] can eat off the plate all you want, but not D.” Between that and every island artist exclaiming what “me don’t do,” I was under the impression that diving into a woman’s nether region was not the move.
Recently, Kanye has allegedly pushed the boundaries of sexuality in hip-hop, but Wayne did it first. In the past 15 years, Lil Wayne has flooded the world with a tsunami of oral-sex references ranging from the confounding—“I eat that cat, just like a lion,” in “Rich as [F—k]”—to the uncompromisingly bold in “No Worries.” This man has single-handedly created a world in which no woman shall ever grow up and have to convince her suitor that oral play is OK. If Lil Wayne doesn’t worry if it’s furry, why should you?
Wayne clearly has his flaws: the drugs, the baby mamas, the increasingly lazy metaphors. But he’s done enough. He’s had his “best rapper alive” days and platinum albums. He’s an OG, and he should be respected as such. With all the drama in his life, songs with vulnerable verses that allowed us into his psyche would make his late-career music much more endearing. An upcoming album with 2 Chainz makes me think that won’t be the case, but it would be shortsighted to count out Wayne; he came from the mud.
Brandon Harrison lives in New York City and has Hollywood stories that rival those of Rick James. He prides himself on staying righteous and knowing more about basketball than you do. Follow him on Twitter.