The Singles Jukebox

Astonishingly, only the second Drake appearance we’ve covered all year…

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Nortey Dowuona: At a point, being on top means you have to fall. And at this moment, Lil Wayne is absolutely perfect on this JustBlazeTypeBeat, because he’s free of the pressure to be anything but a dazzling lyricist. He’s no longer a king, now he’s retired to obsolescence. Nicki is still trying to climb back to the peak — all her sons have not yet been able to fill the void, so she’s stuck behind Saweetie and Big Latto. Meanwhile Drake, who is at the very top, delivers a decent verse, looking down on both his fallen comrade Nicki and long gone king Weezy.
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Thomas Inskeep: Appropriately enough for a new track amended to a 2009 mixtape, this has a very late ’00s feel, largely thanks to the loop from Heather Headley’s “In My Mind” underpinning it all. And that the first voice you hear is Lil Wayne, well — this practically sounds like something off of Da Drought 3, and that’s a great thing. He sounds focused! As for his former protégés, Minaj finally sounds like she’s giving a damn, too — more hip hop and less straight-up pop, Nicki, please! — and Drake sounds like, well, Drake. Someone lock these three in a studio for a month and see what they come up with, huh?
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Jonathan Bradley: Did… did Nicki Minaj literally travel back in time to get a verse from ’09 Mixtape Weezy for this ’21 addendum to her Beam Me Up Scotty tape? I’m not a physicist, but string theory and wormholes are the only ways I can account for the first two minutes of “Seeing Green.” My goodness.
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Samson Savill de Jong: I’ve never really been a fan of any of these three, but Lil Wayne in particular I could arguably be called a hater of. He was the biggest rapper around at a time when my musical taste was forming, and he put me off a genre that would later become my undisputed favourite. So trust me when I say there’s no nostalgia goggles on here, and Wayne absolutely kills his verse. He just goes in so hard and sounds interested and engaged and energetic, and there are bars to back it all up. They knew what they were doing putting his verse first, though, because the other two do not live up to his standard at all. Drake’s verse is ok, with lines that dance on the line between funny and corny (your determination of which side it falls will probably depend on your mood), but it’s at least less soporific than normal. This is probably helped by the beat. Nicki’s verse starts out very weak, rhyming “stand in” with “stand-in” in a play on words that isn’t so much witty as a stand-in for an actual opening line. It gets better later, but not by much, and even she’s admitted she got her ass handed to her.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Nicki is my favorite when she’s rhyming phrases with the exact same phrase, and the double meaning of “stand in” which opens her verse is delivered with signature precision. The less said about Lil Wayne and Drake, the better; all these years later, the queen is still running circles around her sons.
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Alfred Soto: The pandemic inspired Wayne’s sharpest guest verse in months — which isn’t to say he gets “political,” only that things done changed, hence the context must too. Minaj matches him, calling shit on “the corporate giants the machines that went against me.” But Fucking Drake gets two minutes of flaccid talk-rapping, and the lines are terrible: “Your girl was better in the mornin’ like a slice of pizza.”
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Tobi Tella: An overload of 2010 energy, the bars fall on top of themselves so fast it’s hard to even judge the bad ones before more get piled on. Even with a lazy beat and many questionable punchlines (see Wayne musing that girls who have sex MAY be people too), the sheer volume makes this feel like a worthwhile collab for once: the sound of three artists who love to fall back on a schtick actually trying.
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