A Year of Lil Wayne: “Ice Cream”

Day 63: “Ice Cream” –  No Ceilings , 2009

“Bend a girl over put her hands on her ankles / I’m all over this ice cream beat like sprankles.” There are moments throughout Wayne’s discography that leave you both laughing and gaping at his cleverness—he’s like an archetypal trickster character except the tricks he pulls are always on the English language itself—and this is one of them for me. You don’t see it coming at all, since the rhyme all falls in the way he says sprankles, and the beat cuts out here, giving extra emphasis to Wayne’s reminder that, yes, this is the “Ice Cream Paint Job” beat. (His other great acknowledgement of it comes at the very beginning, when he quips, “Young Money, syrup in the Big Shot / Time to do the thang that’s word to your wristwatch” in the same cadence Dorrough uses to begin the original).

Wayne has always shined when tackling the beeping minimalism of hit Southern rap beats, and “Ice Cream Paint Job” is one of the best in that genre. Wayne was at the height of his pop phase when No Ceilings came out, and he drifts into some very poppy beats in the tape’s second half, but for the first half it feels like he’s coming home after an extended time away and settling into his familiar pocket. Thus: “Ice Cream,” in one three-minute verse that drifts from comparing his skinny tires to Chris Rock to a timely “I’m on a Boat” reference (remember how big that song was? Weird times) to going hard “like the boy from 300.” We could list great lines from this song forever (OK, well, for three minutes at least). There’s a series of rhymes that goes, “Concrete shoes won’t help in the river / I don’t care if you was Michael Phelps my nigga / I’m higher than the motherfucking Alps my nigga” and another where he says he has “stupid fruity swag like a motherfucking Runt” before rounding out that insane rhyme pattern with “and I be with my dog like I motherfucking hunt / and every day of the week is the first of the month.”

Emphasis on that last part. This song will make you feel rich as hell—even if “I was in the trenches / now I’m in the Trump” has taken on new significance these days—because feeling rich means, among other things, having the world at your fingertips. Is that ever more true than when you can bend language to your will like this? Wayne is like Rumplestiltskin—another trickster—spinning gold (except he gets away with it). As I like to quote, on days when I’m frustrated with the world, “if you ain’t the bank teller don’t tell me nothing.” Now take that wisdom and go feel like a million bucks.

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