Day 111: "Welcome to tha Concrete Jungle" feat. Juelz Santana – Dedication 2, 2006
There's no tool more valuable in growing to appreciate music than an abundance of spare time; one might argue that my own firm belief in Lil Wayne's excellence is tied to the fact that the most exciting years of his career corresponded with the least busy period of my own life. I can't see the number 111, today's post, and not think about the dorm room—Burton 111, enshrined in our imaginations as "One Eleven"—that became a de facto clubhouse for me my freshman year of college, my Eden of time-wasting locations. Thinking of that room inevitably conjures up memories of sitting around, stoned, watching YouTube videos (still a new, incredible phenomenon at the time), drinking cheap beer while playing Mario Kart Double Dash, and listening to the best rapper alive, a.k.a. Lil Wayne, who made several statements to that effect on his groundbreaking mixtape, Dedication 2. That tape was unbelievable to us, the way Wayne seemed to wander through these spare, rattling beats and just sound so fucking cool. At the time, his big hit was "Make It Rain," with Fat Joe. That played at the parties, while the songs on Dedication 2 were reserved for the more discerning fans of the craft of rapping. I'd never heard someone just rattle off stuff about sports like Wayne did on "Sportscenter," and I wasn't prepared for the political firestorm of "Georgia… Bush." Even the tropes of the DJ Drama/Gangsta Grillz mixtape were fresh.
I didn't know what to make, either, of the groaning, spare synths on "Welcome to tha Concrete Jungle," nor what to do with Juelz Santana, which was one of those names I recognized but didn't really know much about, The Diplomats having only made their way down to my North Carolina high school the year before. I'm not sure I even really realized that was him rapping; information was much scarcer about things like song credits at the time. All I knew was that there was this guy threatening to have people fish fillet his enemies.
Listening to this song now, in the midst of immersing myself in Lil Wayne's music for months, it doesn't feel quite like the anomaly it did the first time, but I suppose that is true of any song, once-discovered, that has since quietly faded into our music fan DNA, forgotten as its own thing yet obliquely thought of as part of the pantheon of songs that made us appreciate music more at one point. In hindsight, the rapping here is almost what I should have expected of Wayne. But of course the mythology was not as clear or as obvious at that point.
The song, though, definitely holds up; if anything, more time and context allow the novelty to fade and invite focus on the construction of the various bars, which is straight up bananas. Juelz follows up his fish fillet riff by telling his victim's mom to go grab a paper and read the headline about the act, then he quips, "But we get twisted laugh and smoke weed about it / and can't nobody do a thing about it / 'cause they'll be in the same boat / literally the same boat / floating across the same sea." Not only does he use the phrase "smoke weed about it," which is one of my favorite phrases, he also comes through with the devastating clarification that it's literally the same boat. And then there's Wayne, who goes from rapping the internal rhyme-laden, "Tempt me and anything can happen I ain't rappin' / I ain't shootin' at your soldiers bitch I'm goin' for the captain / I ain't shootin at your shoulders bitch I'm goin' for your cap and / I won't stop cappin' 'til your wings start flappin'" to describing bringing a girl home to his crib and showing her a gun to offering a serene set of bars about his own weed: "I smoke Beverly Hills, whatever that kill / and leave a nigga with that heavenly feel." No wonder this blew college me away right from the start; it's still a master class.
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