I Feel Like Dying: Lil Wayne Meets With POTUS
You saw the image, the photo, on Thursday night, at the same time as everyone else did, and immediately the old adage proved true.
Only, the 1,000 words were of the expletive kind. Fuck. Shit. Motherfucker. What the fuck. Even combinations like Fucking shit, or Goddamn fucking fuck. Words of that nature, you know the deal.
You want to say that the photo left you speechless but really, it did everything but that. You couldn’t stop swearing; livid, you would call it if you need to put a word on it. Kill your darlings, you know? We’ll get there.
On Thursday night , and it pains you to no end to even write the words, Lil Wayne threw his dignity and legacy down the racism sinkhole when he tweeted a fucking — here’s that word again — photo of himself alongside POTUS and doing the stupid “thumbs up” gesture we’ve all come to loathe. Seriously, the tweet is still up there on his page as we’re typing this and even if it weren’t, we took a screenshot of it; this is a thing that happened and it came with absolutely no preceding fanfare.
Not that a heads-up would have helped swallow such betrayal.
There is no upside here. Here is your favourite rapper of all time, Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., someone who was once upon a time the biggest pop star (let alone rapper) in the world, taking some time out of his busy day and schedule to go along with and lend his name and considerable influence to meet with the so-called leader of the free world and actual racist-in-chief. There’s something in the tweet that Wayne wrote about the why or how of the thing but really, it’s inexcusable. You don’t meet with the current POTUS, not before today, not now and certainly not a mere four or five or however many days are left in this doomed election cycle of hell.
Fucking fuck the actual fuck. This is the same rapper who made the defining post-Katrina song with Georgia…Bush and followed it up by taking Al Sharpton (and anyone like him) to task on Tha Carter III’s DontGetIt.
And yet, perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising. For one thing, Wayne isn’t the first to (kinda) fall from grace, just ask 50 Cent, Ice Cube or K**ye We*t — though that doesn’t really help. “He may be an idiot, but he isn’t the first to become an idiot” is quite the defense. Throughout his career, he’s also collaborated numerous times with artists like XXXTentacion or Chris Brown, both of whom had credible rumours, if not downright accusations, of domestic violence hover against them. “The music is the music” isn’t the most logical either, you know?
No, this isn’t especially surprising because this isn’t the first time Weezy has done or said something stupid when it relates to race, black conservatism and respectability politics. Just earlier this year, he said some asinine bullshit on Fat Joe’s Instagram Live about how maybe black folks should blame themselves for George Floyd’s murder. In 2016, he dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement because…well, he’s a celebrity. “That just sounds weird. I don’t even know why you put a name on it. It’s not a name. It’s not ‘whatever, whatever.’ It’s somebody got shot by a policeman for a fucked up reason,” he said, “I am a young, black, rich motherfucker. If that don’t let you know that America understand black motherfuckers matter these days, I don’t know what it is. Don’t come at me with that dumb shit, ma’am. My life matter, especially to my bitches.”
This prized life really almost ended before it ever started. When Wayne was barely a teenager and just after he had started rapping, his mother prohibited him from cursing in his songs. It apparently upset him so bad that he shot himself in the chest; he only survived because Robert Hoobler, at the time an off-duty policeman, saved him and drove him to the nearest hospital. Not to mention that Wayne released his first solo album in 1999, yet isn’t even 40 years old, and that his first sexual experience might have really been just statutory rape; how can you grow up to be like everyone else when your childhood was anything but normal and spent in the limelight and spotlight?
Wayne, you see, has relied on a worldview where the white man is actually the saviour: because to him, Hoobler was the saviour. (Best left unsaid the fact that this same off-duty officer would eventually be fired in 2012 for tasing a black man he had called “a stupid ass n****r.”)
Quickly after Wayne’s tweet went up on Thursday, a slew of dumbass right-wingers went ahead and chimed in with their “funniest” Lil’ Wayne puns (e.g. “Weezy F Baby and the F is for ‘Four More Years’,” etc.). This made it clear that Wayne had been duped, only this is still giving Wayne too much credit. Because this time, he hadn’t just adlibed during an interview, or joined a social media platform out of the blue.
No, he went to meet POTUS. You can’t say you didn’t know when you literally went to shake the guy’s hands and grinned like a dumb dumb for a photograph. This move was premeditated from Wayne. Calculated. Sure, there’s absolutely no way he’s connected to daily life to know what a vile human being this POTUS is. And sure, he would meet Joe Biden if he wins on Tuesday, or likely just about any- and everyone else who’s been POTUS in history, the same way he’s made songs with any- and everyone who’s wanted to in his career.
Alas, these are all hypotheticals and the only thing definitive we can say is that he met with Trump because it’s Trump who’s POTUS right now. And now Wayne will forever be a card POTUS can pull out of his back pocket as he sees fit.
You feel sick and empty inside.
