Day 338: “6 Minutes” feat. Fabolous and Lil Wayne – Cassidy, I’m a Hustla, 2005
Today, A Year of Lil Wayne frequent contributor, Gudda Gudda scholar, and advanced rhyme analyst Bauce Sauce joins us again to further a theory so dangerous, so bold, that it had to wait until now to be unleashed. The official Year of Lil Wayne Editorial Board (i.e. me), doesn’t necessarily endorse this opinion, but it is willing to entertain it. This is it:
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We’re almost at the end of the A Year of Lil Wayne series, and we’ve done a phenomenal job of documenting all the great, bad, and obscure parts of Wayne’s career. However, I’d like to pose this question: What is Lil Wayne’s best verse?
In a knee-jerk reaction, you say “A Milli.” Unfortunately, you are incorrect.
You then follow that up with “Go DJ?” Wrong again. “Fireman?” Nope. You take 10-15 seconds of deep thought—with your mouth agape and eyes fixated blankly, intensely into the middle distance—for your synapses to fire-crawl through the thousands of hours of Lil Wayne music you have locked away in your brain. You confidently proclaim “Right Above It?” No. “Tha Block is Hot?” You’re getting desperate now. His “Run This Town” remix? Committed to not completely bricking this very objective question that I have posed to you, you double down:
Sqad up era… there’s “Aw Naw,” “Ether,” “We Ready” … Shit. Gotta be “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy.” What about loosies? “30 Minutes to New Orleans” is up there. Wait. This is a trick question. He didn’t specify they had to be on his songs. OK. Guest verses… “Hollywood Divorce”? “Dirty World”?
It’s been a whole minute; I’m still waiting on your answer. Just as I give up hope that you are a real and true Lil Wayne fan, the corner of your mouth twitches into a half-smirk. Your eyes brighten, beaming from within with a bling that only true knowledge can kindle.
“The answer to your question is the 2005 Cassidy deep cut ‘6 Minutes’ featuring Lil Wayne and Fabolous.”
We embrace, and smooch like only a father and a son who stunts like him know how.
At the time of formulating this verse for Cassidy (2004-2005), Wayne was post-Da Drought, post-Tha Carter, and in the midst of recording for the classic Tha Carter II. He was a mere zygote—more like zyGOAT am I right?—on the developmental path to a Mixtape Weezy embryo.
Not only was the timing ideal, creatively, for Wayne to produce a great verse but the song itself helped spur Wayne to reach new heights.
Wayne is very competitive, perhaps more so than most. I mean, you can’t go around calling yourself the best rapper alive if you don’t 1) actively believe it 2) actively prove it. So, it’s no surprise that he shines on posse cuts (e.g. “Forever”, “We Takin’ Over,” “Brown Paper Bag,” etc.). As hard as it is to believe, Cassidy was the man at the time. He had radio locked with “I’m A Hustla.” The fact that a person Wayne was having to share the spotlight with came to him and said “I’m doing a posse cut, and I need 32 bars,” would have been enough to make Wayne black out and conjure stanzas from the deepest part of his heart.
The frenetic Neo Da Matrix-produced track acts as a playground for Wayne. The sped up strings give off this bombastic, nervous energy. Like they are the key bumps Wayne did before entering the booth, and now he desperately needs to get every important thought in his wired brain out before he crashes.
Wayne is so comfortable and confident, finding a pocket to effortlessly rap in then switching meters to match the beat changes.
The beat changes; Wayne matches by changing his meter and mirroring his cadence to the scaling up of the strings:
The beat returns to the main four-bar loop. Wayne obliges by returning to a straightforward AA couplet:
Though Wayne has already done this somewhat leading up to this point in his verse, the middle section is where Wayne begins to flow on top of the beat, extending rhyme schemes to the middle of the next bar to lead into a new rhyme. There are no non-sequiturs for the sake of advancing his lyrics. He begins to split up bars with internal rhymes which makes everything feel so cohesive and fluid.
While we admire rhythmically how this verse sounds, we should not gloss over its wit. It took me five years of listening to this verse before I realized the line “If there’s any beef, I come ‘ron like Mercer” is not just a random name check of an ex-NBA player, but is also a reference to MRSA—the hard-to-treat strain of staphylococcus aureus—which is commonly found in carelessly handled meat. Lil Wayne, you cheeky bitch.
We’re now two-thirds the way through and Wayne has hit a runner’s high. Not necessarily saving the best for last, but saving the best for the final stretch. He once again switches meter when the beat changes, increasing the syllables with which he rhymes (from one to seven). I am willing to die over this being one of the best quatrains in the history of poetry. It includes everything: repetition, seamless wordplay, and vivid imagery.
Every kid who half-read Brave New World, rejoice.
At this point, Wayne is running out of wind as he takes the last few strides in his four-minute mile. When he finishes the list of drugs he can sell you, he exhaustively bellows “Oxycontin” with the urgency of a deep sea diver returning to the surface on the verge of unconsciousness. You realize it’s very possible that he did the previous 28 bars with only one breath.
Most amazingly at no point does Wayne make one one cringeworthy fecal matter punchline. And though he ends his verse with “I’m that shit,” it is designed to be a common refrain for each artist—or rather was supposed to be, as Fabolous dropped the ball not including his Desert Storm variant.
Sure. Lil Wayne has verses where he says more clever things or keeps a flow going for longer than would seem possible. But, Lil Wayne’s “6 MInutes” verse is an unrelenting exhibition of his prowess and creativity. He’s playing around—hanging upside down at the end of the monkey bars taunting everyone else who can’t even make it half-way. This verse gives us a peek into what he has always been capable of, and what we would come to expect during his 2006-2008 mixtape run.
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