Lil’ Wayne, “Whip It Like A Slave,” and the Crisis of Coonery

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[Ed Note: Originally published on www.AllHipHop.com]

“Music is said to soothe the savage beast, but it may also powerfully excite it. … At an emotional level, there is something ‘deeper’ about hearing than seeing; and sometimes about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them.” —Storr, Anthony. Music and the Mind. New York: Free Press, 1992, p. 26.

That Lil’ Wayne is an embarrassment to the rich legacies of musical excellence which paved the road for his rise to prominence is not a breakthrough. It’s a given. An irrefutable fact. But that he would stoop so low to the level of making a song titled, “Whip It Like A Slave,” boggles the mind of even this writer.

For too long, unskilled rappers, like Lil’ Wayne, have landed featherweight punch-lines on the ear-drums of trained listeners, reminding us that the art of lyrical swordsmanship should be left to those best capable of wielding it. But this song, bad pun or not, crosses the line. This time, somebody must be held accountable for the drivel and acerbic vitriol Lil’ Wayne lashed out at his ancestors, who suffered far too much to be disrespected by an intellectually crippled caricature.

The lyrics of the song, which also features super-lyrical southern crew Dem Franchize Boyz, goes:

I wake up in the morning, take a sh**, shower, shave/ Stand over the stove and whip it like a slave/ I whip it like a slave, I whip it like a slave/ Stand over the stove and whip it like a slave/

This hook is maintained for a good 40 seconds (that way, it’s sufficiently ingrained in the minds of young listeners), before Mr. Carter comes in—in signature superciliousness. And just so no one misses the point of the song, he raps: “New day new yay/ Bet I whip it like Kunta Kinte/ Talking sugar, talking dough like a ben-YAY/ I take a brick, karate chop it like a sensei/.”

Of course, it’s always comical to hear Lil’ Wayne discuss the dangerous terrain of drug-dealing. Why, the multi-millionaire who had it made at 11 knows more than anyone else the perils of the dope game.. But even with this awareness, many younger fans are still desperate enough to be lied to blatantly about an experience they know he never partook in, and one which they are foreign to. On this ground, commonality is found. Most of them, you see, are White and rich.

White suburban girls can’t get enough of “Weezy,” and for good reason—he, essentially, validates the centuries-old lies told about Blackness as a racial demerit. Lil’ Wayne is the epitome of a 21st century Minstrel. Stepin’ Fetchit in the flesh. He bucks, coons, and shines, for the shillings tossed his way by far wealthier white executives at the helm of this recording industry.

“Your career is a typo/Mine was written like a Haiku/”

And before we go any further, a couple of points must be addressed:

1). Lil’ Wayne is no gangster, no dope dealer, no Blood. He’s, in truth, merely a child star who cashed in, quite handsomely I might add, on the untimely retirement of Jay-Z in 2004. Many of us who, today, shake our heads consistently at the very thought of Lil’ Wayne being regarded the “Best Rapper Alive,” remember the laughs we shared when he first, in early 2005, declared himself that. Most saw his ambitiousness as an unwise publicity stunt, but lately, circumstances have changed considerably. What we now realize, and are forced to admit, is the enormous control of those “old White men” Mos Def sang about in “The Rape Over” (The New Danger, 2004).. Lil’ Wayne’s success, it can be safely assumed, is a product not of talent or merit but of an agenda long-drafted before he came onto the scene. At best, he’s the dummy whose strings were picked to be pulled by powerful ventriloquists in big skyscraper offices.

2). Lil’ Wayne is powerless. Just that. For one who sold an impressive 1,000,000+ copies with his latest album, Tha Carter III (2008), and has been mentioned no less than twice by the most powerful man in the world, he might be getting less respect, from his bosses, than security guards and janitors.

According to the Irv Gotti golden rule of business in the Hip-Hop industry, to get whatever they want, artists must “get hot.” Well, no other artists, with the exception of Drake, is hotter than Lil’ Wayne at this point, and still, label executives and A&Rs could care less about hurt feelings, as they rip asunder his many aspirations.

In a December 2007 interview with RollingOut Television, Rap mogul Irv Gotti discussed the tricks of the Rap trade: “The key to negotiations and the key to success [is]—just get hot and stay hot, and when you go in that office and have that meeting, check your hotness..” Gotti explained how to ascertain the hotness of an artist: “Say some stupid sh**. If they kick you out [of] the office, Ni**a, you’re not that hot. If you say some outlandish sh** and they sit there and talk with you, you’re pretty hot. If you say some outlandish sh** and they thinking about doing it, Ni**a, you’re off the hook!”

So, let’s put Lil’ Wayne’s career to that test.

In 2008, at peak time, following the huge success of his now-triple platinum album, Mr. Big Shot decided he wanted to release a Rock-themed album, Rebirth. Many laughed and, apparently, some of those were executives at Universal Records—his parent company. After the release of his first single, “Prom Queen,” his manager, Cortez Bryant, was advised that the shot-callers weren’t really feeling the concept, and if Weezy “doesn’t brighten up, they have to turn into Mr. Evil Record Company and just tell him it’s never going to be released.” The album was originally scheduled for an April 2009 release date. It’s been pushed back several times now, but is tentatively set for November 2009. Something tells me—this time next year Rebirth would have been shelved. The reason: Lil’ Wayne, to borrow Gotti’s term, is not hot.

The many impediments put before his collaboration album (three years in the making) with Harlem rapper Juelz Santana, I Can’t Feel My Face, provides further validation.

For this reason, I stand convinced that the concept for Lil’ Wayne’s “Whip It Like A Slave” diatribe was probably suggested by some sleazy executive whose name we might never know. This contention, however, should not be read as an excuse for the vitriolic investments these Black rappers made in the song. But I can see a scenario play out where Lil’ Wayne’s original line was “Whip It Like A Soda,” or a variant of sorts, but a snot-nosed executive heard the hook, thought a while about it, and compelled him to introduce that one word which gives it a completely different context. In fact, I’m not sure you call that compulsion. Forced might be the more accurate adjective.

“Put a barrel in a capo mouth, ‘til his scalp come out/

You a kid, you don’t live what you rap about/”

In spite of this, I’m not sure of many White rappers or MCs who would get away with similar statements. I can see Hip-Hop message boards overflowing past maximum capacity if a, say, Eminem or Asher Roth released such song. I can see the NAACP trotting out its best and brightest to condemn the disrespect hurled at the legacy of more than 80 million people washed away by the rivers of inhumanity and brutality. I can see esteemed Hip-Hop artists, fueled with great pugnacity, penning diss songs to make known their rage at hearing a White rapper flaunt invectives at the history that produced this great culture of ours—which they, today, benefit bountifully from. I can see Hip-Hop sites invoking the works of John Henrik Clarke, John Hope Franklin, Frances Cress Welsing, Carter G. Woodson, Frederick Douglass, C.R. Gibbs, Hubert Harrison, Herbert Aptheker, and Ida B. Wells to damn the acidity of hatred contained in the song. But these weren’t White rappers. As far as I can tell, Lil’ Wayne darkness isn’t debatable. These characters are Black. Yes, Coons and Samboes, but they’re Black nonetheless. So why, then, am I left victim to the voicelessness of Hip-Hop’s countless culture warriors.

Is the pain any less bearable because a Black rapper is the utterer?

“Rappers only talk about Kis., it’s all poison/… Think about the kids you mislead with the poison/”

The impact this song masters on the minds of Lil’ Wayne’s many adoring young Black fans is certainly no less caustic. The message that slavery, its aftermath, and the insurmountable cost of the African Holocaust, are trivial still plays itself out perfectly in the minds of impressionable listeners. Many of these listeners, already accustomed—due to criminally negligent education in public schools—to a fabricated interpretation of slavery, would find great relief, courtesy of Lil’ Wayne (and the masks behind him), that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade isn’t at all the gory and bestial experience it’s been established as.

Some would argue that even young listeners can separate fraud from fact, but I beg to differ. I understand that everyone is innately capable of deciphering the truth, but I also understand that the world in which we live is filled with so much inequity and iniquity that any condition can be adapted to. Any condition. Good or bad. Ignorance, hatred, folly, fame. I understand that even the most repulsive imagery, conjured by half-baked Rap artists, after a while adopts a normalized nature in the psyche of the listener.

Late English author Anthony Storr described this process in his 1994 book, Music and the Mind:

Noise can be threatening to normal people. If someone is hypersensitive to noise, and unable to filter out what is irrelevant from all the different noises which constantly impinge upon him, he may be specifically inclined to deal with it by trying to impose a new order on it, make sense out of it, and thus turn what was threatening into something manageable. [p. 102]

We’ve witnessed this “sense” play itself out in Hip-Hop recently. Lil’ Wayne is hardly the only one to spit terror and torture on the history that gave birth to him. Gone are the days when such audacity invited Timberland boots and golf clubs to the bodies of uninformed Rappers. On the monstrously misogynistic second single of Cleveland Rapper Kid Cudi’s upcoming album, “Make Her Say (Poke Her Face),”—also featuring the ever-conscious Common—Kanye West invokes Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks to demonstrate his financial prowess: “And That’s My Commandment, You Ain’t Gotta Ask Moses/ More Champagne, More Toastest /More Damn Planes, More Coastest/ And Fuck A Bus, The Benz Is Parked Like Rosa/.” Of course, West’s comments appear mild in the face of Atlanta Rapper Young Jeezy who had previously compared himself to MLK, Malcolm X and Jesus. And not to forget Lil’ Wayne demanding, two years ago, that a XXL interviewer “[t]alk to me like you talk to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. You’re not going to ask him about what he thinks about what somebody said about him. You ask him about his greatness and his greatness only.” Pretty damn accurate if you ask me.

Well, since Lil’ Wayne sees fit to anoint himself the modern-day MLK and Malcolm X, I’ll appreciate any fans who can relay to him, when next he stops by, just how proud we are to have Martin Luther King or Malcolm X “wake up in the morning, take a sh**, shower, shave/ Stand over the stove and whip it like a slave.”

Article by Tolu Olorunda

Tolu Olorunda is a cultural critic. He can be reached at: Tolu.Olorunda@gmail.com.

Tolu has written 17 article(s) for us.