Young Money boss, Lil Wayne, has opened up about why he stopped writing his lyrics down on paper.
The Lollipop crooner revealed that he stopped penning his lyrics after learning that Jay-Z strictly freestyled without a pen and paper.
Weezy who joined The Pivot Podcast threw more light on the moment, he decided to trash his notebook.
“Like Biggie, love Biggie, love Jadakiss — I love all that shit, but Jay. The moment I heard it I stopped. You could ask my boy. ‘I heard that n-gga JAY-Z don’t write no more. We went in the studio and we did ‘10,000 Bars’ and that was the last time I rapped anything off of a paper.”
The 10,000 Bars song the Mirror rapper was referring to is a 35-minute-long song from 2002 featuring the former Hot Boys rapper spitting the last of his written rhymes in a rapid-fire fashion with the pieces of paper being discarded even picked up by the microphone.
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In May this year, Wayne recalled a time that fellow rapper, Birdman called him out for allegedly trying to sound like JAY-Z when he was rapping.
“When you find a favorite artiste, you’re going to start sounding like them,” he told Rolling Stone.
“It took Birdman and them to pull my ass aside and be like, ‘Bro, I’m tired of every song you doing sounding like damn Jay-Z. You’re not Jay-Z”, Lil Wayne continued.
The Young Money boss and the Roc Nation founder have had a long rivalry relationship while clashing on tracks like DJ Khaled’s God Did, Tha Carter III‘s Mr. Carter, Hello Brooklyn 2.0, and Swagga Like Us.
Amidst their battles, Lil Wayne once praised and commended Jay-Z’s 1999 Vol. 3…Life and Times of S. Carter as one of his favorite albums of all time.
“Jay-Z, Life and Times of Shawn Carter, plain and simple,” Wayne told Lil Baby in 2020.
“It was the first album where I actually [bought] the car that the rapper was talking about. That was my album”, he further shared with Lil Baby.
The Young Money boss actually ended up having Vol. 3 lyrics tattooed on him and has freestyled over album hits such as Big Pimpin in the past.
“Also, Jay talked so crazy,” he continued. “He went bananas on that album. I got lyrics from the album tattooed on me and shit. I have songs that are remakes of spinoffs of songs from that album.”
In a recent conversation with UNDISPUTED, the Lollipop hitmaker revealed another reason why he stopped jotting down his lyrics. The A Milli rapper stated that it was due to being “too old and tired,”
The celebrated American rapper further went on to add:
Thank God for the iPhone. Before, I would have to remind myself all day because I don’t write nothing down. They always be thinking that it’s some type of achievement. I don’t write because I’m too old and too tired to be trying to read. You know, they got the iPhone now so I go ahead and record the voice memo.”
On October 3, Lil Wayne who was a guest on The Tonight Show explained his unique approach to recording new music — he doesn’t write down any song lyrics.
“I just go in there and what I was feeling that day is how it goes,” the rapper said Tuesday to host Jimmy Fallon about how he freestyles the lyrics to his songs when he goes into the studio.
Wayne further shared about his recording process:
“It’s always a different trigger meaning sometimes it might be somebody else’s song or maybe a feature, they already had that subject so I just stick to the subject. If it’s mine, if the music is what it is. I go off the music. If I had a subject already on my mind, something that was bothering me or some verse that been rhyming too long and I didn’t see a mic yet, there it is.”
The rap star joked about how The Tonight Show staff wrote down lyrics for one of his songs so that he could study it before performing. Fallon showed a photo of Wayne reading lyrics from a paper onstage during rehearsals.
The hip-hop star performed his song Dedicate with help from Tonight Show band, The Roots. His latest album Tha Carter V was released on Friday following a long delay.