Put That On Your Playlist: DontGetIt

Song: DontGetIt

Album: Tha Carter III

Honourable Mention: Let’s Go (Lights Out)

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Lil Wayne, political activist? Unless you’re asking Al Sharpton, you’d probably agree after a listen of Weezy’s final song on Tha Carter III.

DontGetIt follows a classic formula and hits plenty of the bedrocks of making “real” hip-hop songs 101, namely the flipping of an iconic soul sample (i.e. in this case it’s Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood) to indicate and parallel what will come in the rapper’s lyrics throughout the song: #DeepFeels and #Emotions, and things of that nature. On DontGetIt, this is mostly what Wayne does over the course of the track’s two verses, working in references to growing up with a single mother but never really saying much of great, great substance. But really the crown jewel of the song is what comes after the two verses.

Because at the end, Wayne emulates another hiphop staple by going on an all-time spoken word bit. For the last seven+ minutes of this 10-minute track, Weezy gives us a rant for the ages and rather than tell a life story like Kanye West (for College Dropout’s Last Call, or Lupe Fiasco on Food & Liquor’s Outro), he somehow turns political. Yes, on the very same album where he had songs like Lollipop, Amilli and Pussy Monster, Wayne turns political for the outro of a song on the final song of the biggest album of his career.

He’s high out of his mind, which takes a bit away from the substance of his message and makes the listener wonder why he didn’t just rap about everything here, but he still mostly makes sense. (Or maybe we’re just giving him too much credit. We’ll cop to that.) During this rant, Wayne tackles and deconstructs myths about minimum prison sentences, institutionalized racism, the fact that the powers that be will want to extract the drug dealer from the suburban but won’t bat an eye when they replace him with a sex offender, and the (non) arbitrary logic for why the American justice system tends to punish black and white drug dealers on different terms despite committing the alleged same crimes. (We’re probably extrapolating a lot of these and making Wayne’s points for him, but again the man is drugged out of his mind lol, let’s give him a break.)

To top it off, Wayne turns his venom toward Al Sharpton, whom he suspects is and about whom the nicest thing he says is probably that he’s “just another Don King, with a perm, hahah, just a little more political, and that just means you’re a little unhuman.”

Poor Sharpton would call Wayne an asshole here. Can’t win ’em all, Al, maybe you oughta informate before you speculate.

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Beat: 8/10

Lyrics: 9/10

Verdict: 9/10