Lil Wayne says that he chose to stop writing down his lyrics after he learned that JAY-Z had done the same. He recalled the decision during a recent interview on The Pivot podcast.
"The moment I heard it, I stopped. You can ask them," Wayne said, confirming the last time he ever wrote down his lyrics. The remark brought with it jokes from fans on social media. One Instagram user commented: "Sounds about right… Music been trash since 2008." Another wrote: "The amount of terrible rap we’ve gotten since this became public knowledge is ridiculous i directly correlate this thinking to the decline of hip-hop."
Lil Wayne Performs At Lil WeezyAna
JAY-Z actually joked about inspiring "a generation of bad writers" during an interview with MTV News regarding his process back in 2007. Despite choosing not to write, he still revealed that he had recently advised one of his nephews to write as much as possible, explaining that he had simply gotten in the habit of not writing. “My process is different now," he said at the time. "It sounds great on paper, like ‘I’mma sit down, I’m going to write the entire album like I did before.’ But once you get back in the studio and you’ve been doing this process for years and years now, so it just felt natural to do it the way I’ve been doing it: no paper, no pen, just listen to the music.”
Lil Wayne On Not Writing His Lyrics
It's not the first time Wayne has revealed that he followed suit in JAY-Z's technique. He also discussed the decision during an interview on the I Am Athlete podcast last year. He said at the time: “At like 16 or 17, I made a choice that I’m about to stop writing. Like, I’m about to stop writing my sh*t out. I had too many [thoughts coming at once]… that’s when that really started happening. I told you, I deal with that… the words keep popping up in my damn head, and that’s when it really started happening, becoming a headache, a real problem. That’s when I said, I’m not about to write no more.”
[Via]