Put That On Your Playlist: Lollipop

Charles BlouinGascon
Nov 5 · 4 min read

Song: Lollipop

Album: Tha Carter III

Honourable Mention: Leather So Soft (Like Father, Like Son)

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Where to even start here ughhhh? Lollipop was an absolute definite inclusion in this list, but it’s also one we held off on writing about for the longest.

Because, again, where do you even start with Lollipop?

Wayne has been telling us that we are not the same, he is a martian — and no song in his entire career better represents this than his über-hit Lollipop. When it first dropped on March 13, 2008, before it reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, before it sold over five million units in the U.S. and over 9.1 million copies worldwide in the first year — again, reread the figures in the previous sentence: this is mind-boggling — before all that, what was so obvious about Lollipop is how it sounded so much like it was from the future. But now more than 11 years after its release, Lollipop still sounds so much from the future: if it’s from the future, it’s from one that’s still distant to our day and age.

Lollipop is plenty of different things. For the reasons and numbers outlined above, it’s the song Wayne is most famous for, which tends to open him as many doors as it closes for him: it’s kinda tough to hail him as the genius lyricist that he is when this song’s best line is, like, what? “She even wear her hair down her back like mine” is probably it, right? Either that or the wonderfully cringy and stupid, “I get her on top, she drop it like it’s hot. And when I’m at the bottom, she Hillary Rodham,” which again is a pun on Hillary Clinton that Wayne sneaked inside a worldwide pop hit.

But that’s the thing about Lollipop. It became a global phenomenon and propelled Lil Wayne to new heights and notoriety that, frankly, no rapper has reached since. It accomplished all this by being very much not a display of lyrical rap and very much a, quote unquote, real pop song. No song has aged better this century than this one in part because it’s the ultimate example and the fully actualized potential of Weezy’s quirks, weirdness, creativity and boundary-pushing tendencies distilled into one massive pop song.

Lollipop probably shouldn’t have worked, and still shouldn’t to this day, as well as it did and does — but we’ll be damned if it doesn’t. It might be the most simple song of Wayne’s career, and a play on a bad pun at that, that never takes off beyond that one simple song and pun. It’s a song about and wanting and receiving head from a woman whose lady lumps (LOL) you love. It’s a song featuring a singer in Static Major, who passed before the video and the song were released. It’s a damn good argument for anyone who believes that Wayne never raps about anything because, hey look on the biggest song of his career, he didn’t rap about anything but oral sex. And really, he didn’t even rap about it in the first place, he used AutoTune to death on the track. It’s true, too. Typically, Wayne songs are typically about drugs, sex or him saying how great he is at rapping, and oftentimes he’ll switch between all three topics on the same song, or verse. But Lollipop is about one thing and one thing only.

That said, it’s also a great pop song and a clear timestamp from the late-aughts. It’s an artist stepping into the limelight he had spent half a decade begging to have focused on him and crashing the absolute hell out of it. It’s a mess of a beat, but also one that allows him to showcase his great sense of melody and creativity, all doused under a shroud of AutoTune veil. It’s a simple song that feels brand new every time you listen to it, a song that shouldn’t work as wonderfully as it does, and yet it does. It’s a song that feels utterly out of this world, one created by a self-avowed Martian, but it’s also a song so imprinted in our collective consciousness that we really couldn’t imagine it without it.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lil Wayne, a Martian.

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Beat: 10/10

Lyrics: 10/10

Verdict: 10/10

amanmusthaveacode

The blog provides commentary on media, sports and pop culture. It looks at overarching themes and issues and goes beyond the typical stories. Most of all, it tries to laugh: give laughing a chance.

Charles BlouinGascon

Written by

Poutine. Sarcasm. #GFOP. My own views. Wayne fever forever. Not a troll account.

amanmusthaveacode

The blog provides commentary on media, sports and pop culture. It looks at overarching themes and issues and goes beyond the typical stories. Most of all, it tries to laugh: give laughing a chance.

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