You Thought Lil Wayne Was Weezy, But Weezy is Wayne

We can start off with a song. It's "DontGetIt," the last track from Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III. It starts off fairly normally, sampling Nina Simone's version of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The track is about three minutes long, and then it goes into an extended rant from Lil Wayne.

He begins by talking about racial disparity in drug sentencing, noting that it would be less expensive to send drug offenders to college than to send them to jail. I'm with him on all of this. He takes a slight left turn when he begins to talk about how jails are too crowded with small-time drug offenders that they're letting out sex offenders and child molesters. Apparently, in Lil Wayne's view, "You move him out [i.e., the drug dealer], bring him to jail for life, and then you move in a sex offender."

But he's not done yet. He decides to take on Al Sharpton, for some perceived slight. I don't really care what their beef is, so I haven't looked it up. But he goes after Sharpton for being, "no MLK, you are no Jessie Jackson, you're nobody to me. You're just another Don King with a perm."

Wayne ends with a great couplet: "I love being misunderstood, why? 'Cause I live in the suburbs, but I come from the hood." What's most interesting is what happens next. He calls out, "bring the hook in," and Simone's voice comes back, singing, "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."

I'm sure people have written about this type of thing before, but I was incredibly struck, listening to this track today, how sampling allows artists to claim the authority of other figures. In this case, it's Nina Simone: respected figure of the black cultural pantheon who seems, by way of being sampled, to support Lil Wayne's arguments, whatever they happen to be. The beef with Sharpton is rather trivial, the thing about sex offenders seems like paranoid ravings, and the first bit about sentencing disparities is spot-on, but it doesn't really matter. By sampling Simone's voice so effectively here, Wayne appropriates some of her authority towards his own ends. And it's a great track, too.