Lil Wayne probably couldn’t have predicted just how successful his signees Nicki Minaj and Drake would turn out to be, but he definitely had strong feelings about them from the start.
In his new XXL cover story, Weezy explained why he signed the two young rappers to his label a few years ago. As for Nicki, well, she was just out here hurtin’ dudes.
“I wanted a female. Every team needs a female to rep your gang [and] she was annihilating n—-s, I mean males,” Wayne said. “I was like, ‘I have to beef my sh– up on that muthaf—ka.’ She just knocked it out the park from day one. She’s just Nicki.”
When it came to Drake, Weezy was simply blown away by the fact that he could rap and sing so well.
“Call me old-fashioned and country, but with Drake, that was the first time I’d seen someone that knew how to sing and rap. That’s all it was,” he said. “I didn’t know nobody who knew how to do that. You had those old school singing n—-s, where people would do a little eight-bar verse on their songs. But [Drake] was spitting and singing and killing that too.”
It wasn’t instant though.
“It wasn’t until I heard him spitting on one of my beats when I was like, ‘This fool’s retarded.’ When I hear something that I know I can’t do better? That’s when I’m like, ‘They need to be on the team.’”
Outside of Nicki and Drake, Wayne added that most rappers today sound too similar to each other. “I don’t know where the authenticity is in the game anymore,” he said. “Today everyone sounds alike, they looking alike, they acting alike, they dressing alike. I came out when everybody was super different.”
Hear Weezy tease the upcoming Drake vs. Lil Wayne tour in the video below.
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