English is Stupid. Proof? Lil Wayne’s New Album, Funeral
English is Stupid.
The English language, much like America, is truly a melting pot. It’s Germanic but also Latin-based; it rips words whole hog from dozens of other languages; it has as many exceptions as rules. And it has “contronyms,” words with two meanings that are the direct opposite of each other! That’s right, the same word means both one thing and its opposite, like “to seed” the ground means to put seeds in, but “to seed” a fruit means to take seeds out.
English is Messy, Confusing, Chaotic – Like Weezy
All this makes English messy, confusing, chaotic, and, well, stupid – but only stupid in the sense of, “my flow is stupid,” meaning great. And English has never been proven “stupider” (greater) than on Lil Wayne’s newest album, Funeral. He says so himself on the track “Mama Mia,” repeating four times: “I’m stupid.”
Mama Mia! Those vowels!
To understand why “Mama Mia” is stupid-great, we need to look at English vowels. Most rhyming in rap is vowel rhyme, or “assonance.” In Spanish, vowel rhyme occurs only when the same letter is used, because Spanish has only five vowel sounds. Yup, just five. And each vowel in Spanish always makes the same sound: a-ah, e-eh, i-ee, o-oh, and u-oo.
But English has more than a dozen vowel sounds. You never know what sound a vowel is going to make. For example, the ‘a’ in “pay” sounds completely different from the ‘a’ in “pal.” Nor can you know just by hearing it how to spell a vowel sound. The same vowel sound in “pay” is spelled differently in “pain” and in “pane.” This makes English very difficult for non-native speakers, but it makes English stupid-cool for Lil Wayne to rap with.
You say tomayto, I say tomahto.
English vowels are ripe – like tomatoes – for Wayne to cook up sophisticated, wildly creative rhymes. For example, in 2008’s smash Tha Carter III, Wayne, explicitly takes on the problems of vowel pronunciation, adding his own word to the classic tomayto / tomahto problem when he says,“funeral [“al” like “pal”], funeruhl / you say tomayto, I say tomahto.” Did you catch that? He adds a play on the word “funeral,” the name of this newest album. The connections go much deeper between that 2009 song, “You Ain’t Got Nuthin’” and the Funeral track “Mama Mia.”
A Match Made in Heaven
In, “You Ain’t Got Nuthin’”, Wayne mispronounces “asinine.” He says, “…asineen. Damn! I mean, asinine,” thereby pivoting his rhyme scheme from “een” to “ine.” And in “Mama Mia!” he pulls the same kind of trick – this time to pivot the rhyme scheme from a/oo to oo/a – when he says “my massages masseuse me. / Oops! I mean masseuses massage me.” Further, in both “You Ain’t Got Nuthin” and “Mama Mia,” Wayne drops the Capital One commercial line “what’s in your wallet?” Too much overlap to be coincidence.
Ooooooooo! It’s spelled like that?!
Lil Wayne runs the table with vowel spellings in “Mama Mia.” Wayne takes one vowel sound, “oo,” and shows us ten different ways to spell it:
*yoo sound contains oo sound
No wonder I can’t spell!
So, the same sound can be spelled both “ue” and “eu,” not to mention the eight other ways. And even the same spelling, “oo” doesn’t always make the “oo” sound. On the same track, Wayne uses “oo”-spelled words that make completely different sounds, like the sound of “look,” “took” and “foot” or still another in “good” and “hood.” Wayne proves himself a veritable vowel rhyme dictionary.
Wayne’s cleverness is no accident.
Proving this isn’t an accident, in the middle half of the track, when it’s the deliberate rhyme scheme, the “oo” sound appears over 57 times – with crazy spellings in words like masseuse, douching, gruesome, beautiful and view. But when it’s not the rhyme in focus – the outside half of the track – it only appears 11 times, in unavoidable words like “you,” “to,” “too,” and “new.”
Wayne goes so much deeper than vowels.
But Wayne doesn’t just play with vowels. The track has deeper meanings. For example, it opens with: “What is good, brother? Beat ‘round the bush, and Imma come around with a bush cutter.” If you’re wondering who is coming after brothers in the bush with cutters, he bookends the track with: “He faker than the lashes on his babe. / I’m like lashes on a slave,” which are as real as Wayne, who is “ashin’ on his head.” Ash Wednesday, dust to dust. Wayne’s as serious as a Funeral. Wayne is not just showing off with empty wordplay. The other guy? Well, “his Apple Card is dead.” Frivolous, shallow. But Wayne: “Don’t judge me. I took the stand and fought the case.” [echoing Wayne’s past line “only God can judge me.”]
“I look down, I see them. I look up, I don’t see any.”
Lil Wayne, on a 2009 track “Demolition Freestyle Part 2”
Nothing in rap matches such sophistication and interconnectedness. Wayne continues fighting the case: “It’s a hot summer…I’m hooded up like Trayvon.” Violence, shootings, murders all rise with the heat index. In homage to one late great victim, “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me” references 2Pac’s “Hail Mary,” a line previously used by Wayne in the 2010 track “Right Above It.” In the ranks of rap genius, we could say of Lil Wayne’s Funeral, “only heaven’s right above it.”
By Kreston Kent, Author of The Literary Genius of Lil Wayne (www.krestonkent.com)
By Kreston Kent, Author of The Literary Genius of Lil Wayne (www.krestonkent.com)
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