They Said What?

So, this post is not going to have some overarching point or trying to say something important. This is going to be a list of absolutely questionable rhymes from rappers who are exponentially better than whatever these lines might say about them. There are so many, many examples that I can’t in good faith get to them all (I’ll save discussion of Nas for another day), so we’ll start with the one that made me really start thinking about this idea.

If you listen to “Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber,” you’ll hear Ghostface Killah go on a run, just spitting some quality rhymes. Then without warning, you hear the following “I’m raw, I’m rugged and raw.” Fundamentally, not a terrible line, but it is bewildering. What does it mean? Why did he repeat it? It still confuses me as a line to the day.

The next line that I added to this archive was this line from Guru, a phenomenal MC, on “DWYCK” from Gang Starr’s album Hard to Earn: “Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is.” Again, fundamentally not a bad line, but he isn’t rapping about lemonade or beverages either before or after this line. It makes functionally no sense within the track, making it a true puzzler.

With these kicking around in my head, I launched into some research to find terrible raps from otherwise very good MCs. Because this is the track that I’m listening to as I got to this point, let’s look at this line from Canibus on “Making a Name for Ourselves,” a track he does with Common (a/k/a America’s Black dad): “Y’all niggas is scared, I’m your worst nightmare squared/that’s double for niggas who ain’t mathematically aware.” Clearly, one of those fellows is Canibus, because this math does not work. This is shocking because his “brain is IBM compatible.” (DJ Clue’s “Fantastic 4” is the track where he throws out this gem.) Furthermore, he repeats it multiple times in the track. No one in his crew told him that this is bad math. And he wonders why he never fully took off.

To stay on this math tip, there is this real gem from Foxy Brown in “Affirmative Action”: “32 grams raw, chop it in half, get 16, double it, times 3/We got 48, which means we got a whole lot of C.R.E.A.M./Divide the profit by 4, subtract it by 8, we back to 16.” So, through some miracle, the actual math does work. On the other hand, what she says here does not. Her math as spoken leaves you with 4, not 16. I would not want to do deals with her; she’ll short me. However, I would buy stuff from her because I would get an excellent deal.

Along these same lines, there is another display of atrocious math by Redman on “5 Boroughs”: “My paragraph alone is worth five mics/A twelve song LP, that’s 36 mics.” Since he’s referring to the Source rating scale, it should be 60 mics for the LP. Is he saying that his albums have filler tracks? That’s not the best look, my guy. Maybe he’s just keeping it exceedingly real. But let that just bump around in your mind.

I’ll be real with you right now: this whole post could have been about Lil Wayne. This man has so many extremely dumb rhymes in his oeuvre. I’m only going to mention two here. The first is offensive, and the second is funny. The first is from “Karate Chop”: “Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till.” In fairness to Weezy, he did apologize for this line, but the damage has been done; this is still on record. (If this one goes over your head, please go read a book and learn something about this country’s history.) The second line is from “Dr. Carter”: “Swagger tighter than a yeast infection/Fly go hard like geese erection.” That’s just a funny line. What does it even mean? I don’t even know how to start cracking on this, that’s how puzzling these lines are. This is why he is one of the greatest rappers of our time.

Continuing on funny lines, peep this one from OJ da Juiceman on “I’m Getting Money”: “Moving in the Grand Prix, same color as thunder.” Let us never forget that thunder has absolutely no color; it is a sound. Lightning has a color, sure, but definitely not thunder. There is also this gem from The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments”: “Rule nombre uno.” So, this translates as rule name one, not rule number one, as I’m sure Mr. Wallace intended. Just put that on a track with no one saying maybe he should change that. This should be a reminder to everyone that you need to have one sober person in your crew. That guy or gal would have caught this error.

J. Cole is arguably one of the most popular rappers of our current era. He’s very talented, but he does drop some stinkers. Here’s an example from “Dollar and a Dream III”: “I let you feel like you the shit, but boy you can’t out-fart me.” Why does it matter that he can’t be out-farted? Is this a sign of greatness, your ability to fart? I can fart. Does that make me a great rapper? If I’m gassy, does that make me the GOAT?

I’m going to wrap this thing up by talking about two rappers who are widely beloved: 2 Chainz and Jay-Z. We’ll start with 2 Chainz, a true master of language. On his track “Marble Floors,” he drops this absolute pearl of a rhyme: “Cup filled with pink, I’m supporting breast cancer.” If only breast cancer could be cured by rappers drinking lean. We would have cured breast cancer decades ago. There is also this gem from “Birthday Song”: “She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty.” Straightforward, to the point, absolutely inessential. This last one is controversial because it might actually be a good line. It is from “I’m Different”: “And I wish a nigga would, like a kitchen cabinet.” On second thought, I rescind my initial support for this being a possibly good line.

To end this dispatch, we’ll turn our attention to Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers of all time. He has a litany of atrocious rhymes, but I want to focus on the most infamous of them all: his guest verse on Aubrey Graham’s “Pound Cake”:

I wonder which part of this rap is the laziest. Is it the initial pound cake line? It doesn’t mean anything. In no place is a pound equivalent to 500 million anything. Is it the upside-down cake? Again, how does frontin’ result in upside-down cake. Why couldn’t the clown cakes just be clowns? I don’t think that clown cakes necessarily have red noses. I see the wordplay he’s trying here, but karat cake is just lazy beyond all belief. I’m sure he was smiling in the booth when he came up with that one. He was like, “Yea, I fucking nailed that.” Yet he outdoes his own laziness by just chanting cake at the beginning and the end of the verse. A disappointing show from a man who arguably wrote one of the greatest takedowns in rap history with “The Takeover.”

I hope that you’ve got a laugh or two from these extremely dumb lines. I’ll be revisiting this idea in the future across other genres. If you know some dumb lines, drop them down in the comments. I would love to hear them. Alright, this is all for me. I’ll see y’all on Wednesday with a new set of Spins.