A Brief Poetic Analysis of Weezy's “Truffle Butter" Verse

THE FINAL lines of Lil Wayne's verse on "Truffle Butter" are magic. Not the words, of course; they're just a grab bag of oft-perverse rapperly braggadocio (e.g., paraphrasing, Beware my city is so hard people die over sneakers). But the SOUNDS. What use of language for mellifluous effect!

Goes like this:

I'm so heartless, thoughtless, lawless and flawless
Smallest, regardless, largest in charge and
Born in New Orleans
Get kilt for Jordans
Skateboard I'm gnarly
Drake, Tunechi and Barbie


Why is this so delightful? My poetry terms are rusty, but I think the delight results from a complexly intertwining rhyme scheme with assonance (which, as you may recall from a bygone English class, means repetition of vowel sounds.) 

He opens with two internally-rhyming lines (heartless-thoughtless-lawless-flawless/smallest-regardless-largest), and simultaneously begins an assonant pile-on of 'ah's that carries through the end of the verse (thought-law-flaw-small-regard-large-charge-Orleans-Jordans-gnarly-Barbie). Course you gotta say 'Orleans' and 'Jordans' the proper Tunechi way for it to work.

At line three the structure changes utterly, in mid-sentence (enjambment!), without any break in flow. The phrases shorten, the lines start to end-rhyme, the meter shifts. The first two lines are roughly trochaic tetrameter, so four sets of stressed/unstressed syllable pairs; the assonant 'ah's are stressed and the rhyming 'ess' endings are unstressed. Lines three through five are dactyl-trochee pairings: SKATEboard I'm is a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed) and GNARly is a trochee (stressed-unstressed).

In the final line he lets Drizzy and Nicki be the stressed syllables, leaving his own moniker humbly unstressed. Perhaps an acknowledgement of his semi-emeritus, godfatherly role in today's rap world?

Tweet