Day 353: "Can't Stop Partying" feat. Lil Wayne – Weezer, Raditude, 2009

Many times in the course of my writing A Year of Lil Wayne, someone has asked me to name the best Lil Wayne line. OK, technically this has never happened. But I have imagined it happening many times, and I've spent a lot of time considering what my answer might be. Naturally, given the sheer volume of incredibly good Lil Wayne lines that exist, this is an incredibly difficult question to answer. You could spend a lifetime unfurling a long parchment scroll of bad Rap Genius annotations before you got close to a conclusion. Think of all the many hours of mixtapes you'd have to parse to even rationally consider a response.

That is, until you realize that rationality has nothing to do with it, set aside all pretense of ego, and bow down to the gods and goddesses of music. Then, you will realize that, following the quadrant of cosmic laws of rock and roll, of hip and hop, there is only one possible answer.

The best Lil Wayne line is: "OK bitches, it's Weezer and it's Weezy!"

That's right. Or rather, that's right, bitches. Oh, did you forget that Weezer and Lil Wayne made a song together? Well you couldn't have once you heard that line! That line is the equivalent of the Doritos Loco Taco in music: It sounds like an idea dreamed up in a board room to combine two things based on one extremely flimsy similarity, which should have yielded a final product that sucked hard but instead led to something extremely fucking kickass. It's dumb as hell, but so is the mere concept of combining Weezer and Weezy. What is that supposed to even entail? Sometimes, the best answer is the most obvious one, and in this case it would have been a crime if we had made it out of this song without someone making this connection. If Lil Wayne hadn't done it, then some dumb blogger would have instead, and that would have been indescribably lame.

Look, I would never purport to be a Weezer scholar. I haven't listened to a full Weezer album since the Green Album. From what I know about Rivers Cuomo being a gigantic dweeb, it seems likely that this song enlisted Lil Wayne because to Rivers Cuomo Lil Wayne represented the tendencies of the culture Rivers wanted to skewer, which is a pretty sheisty move. But if that is indeed the joke, then the joke is on Rivers. Because I can authoritatively say this is the best Weezer song since "Island in the Sun." Seriously, in addition to it being Weezer and Weezy, it is produced by motherfucking Polow da Don. The chorus is actually pretty catchy. And as much as Lil Wayne bodies the thesis statement, he does a pretty good job with the rest of the verse, too. Seriously, this is so hard I'm just going to copy it out in full:

Party like tomorrow is my funeral

Gotta stop mixing alcohol with pharmaceuticals

And the unusual is the fucking usual

Man, my life is beautiful and my girls are mutual

OK bitches, Weezer and it's Weezy

Upside down MTV

Please don't shoot me down because

I'm an endangered species

It's the days of our lives but my night just started

I pray the killer doesn't take the life out the party

Lest you ever question whether Lil Wayne is the greatest, consider that he incepted the entirety of Soundcloud rap by spitting the lines "Party like tomorrow is my funeral / gotta stop mixing alcohol with pharmaceuticals" on a literal goddamn Weezer song. Damn right he's an endangered species! Who else has done something close to that? Genius doesn't reside in making art that's by the book. It resides in being smart enough to be dumb enough to throw together Weezer and Weezy because it sounds funny, and that's reason enough.

Side note: In celebration of dumbassery, I should acknowledge that I have somehow screwed up the tally of days for the Year of Lil Wayne. I don't have three days left; I should have 13. I'm going back to try to find out where I went wrong and fix it before the Year becomes 366 days long, so bear with me. UPDATE: The day has been fixed!