There’s the double repetition of a single word in the span of one bar, when Wayne raps “beat round the bush and I’ma come around with a bush cutter” and then follows it up with “Y’all lil’ niggas is some foot soldiers, I’m a foot fungus.” He mispronounces a popular word or phrase (“New Tang clan, like Raekwon, I’m stupid, nigga”) and then becomes amused by his own mispronunciation. In every nook and cranny of the song, there’s a callback to one of Wayne’s patented lyrical tricks. In contrast, “Mama Mia” is in the mold of Wayne classics like “A Milli” or “6 Foot 7 Foot.” For almost four minutes, he raps and raps and raps until his lungs sound like they’re deprived of oxygen. Over the years, Wayne’s ear for production has deteriorated, but on “Mahogany” the chops, starts, stops, and changes in pitch help give him a foil for his voice. Part of the song’s effectiveness comes from Mannie’s knack for beats that move and shift without a clear center of gravity. Mahogany dash, slime, I do the dash, slime Mahogany door handle to match the floor panel Mahogany skin, touch me, I cut your hands off I think in my backyard, I need an airport By the second verse, Weezy is teetering on the edge as he tries to think of all of the ways he could use the word before his voice runs out of gas: He sounds particularly at home atop the jittery sample of “Mahogany.” Buoyed by his old Cash Money colleague Mannie Fresh and Sarcastic Sounds, Wayne raps about…mahogany. “Mahogany” and “Mama Mia” are multi-syllabic, mush-mouthed torrents of internal rhyme, where bad puns bleed into childish punchlines and hooks are mostly an afterthought. The man behind them was harnessing a rare velocity most musicians can never capture.Ī long time has passed since then, but on these two songs, Wayne offers something that honors his past while comfortably existing in the present. His jokes, metaphors, similes, patterns, ad-libs, melodies, screeches, and prolific mind-dumps were vehicles of sheer momentum. Wayne was at his peak back then, regularly offering some of the most captivating run-on sentences in the English language. As long as “Mahogany” and “Mama Mia” are playing, it’s still 2006, the music industry is crumbling, and within the cinders of Cash Money is a young man who’s ready to prove he’s the very best at the singular thing he does for a living. For 403 seconds near the start of his new album, Lil Wayne makes Funeral feel like a transmission from the past.