“Shooter (f/ Robin Thicke)” – Lil’ Wayne
(Words/music: Dwayne Carter and Robin Thicke, available on Tha Carter II, Cash Money / Universal 2005)

I still remember the moment where Lil’ Wayne commanded my attention.  While flipping through channels late at night, I caught the end of the Tonight Show just in time for the musical guest.  I saw Jay Leno holding a CD, so I stopped to see who was performing.  Admittedly, I stayed not because I had any interest in Lil’ Wayne but because the guy he was with was named Thicke (like the guy from Growing Pains?) and looked like he came out of an advertisement for a prep school.  It was an odd pairing – Thicke in his sweater on one side of the stage and a shirtless Wayne running around the rest of the stage like his pants were on fire.  In a way, the music sounded like this too – Thicke sang the introduction like a piece of slowed down blue-eyed soul (“Shooter” is adapted from his own track “Oh Shooter”), giving way to Hurricane Wayne when it came time for his verses.  With a live band (and a DJ, I think) punctuating Wayne’s lines with horn kicks, Wayne ran around the stage like a man possessed. 

This performance of “Shooter” (which I’ve only seen once and have never been able to find online) captivated me based on its on-stage theatrics, but the track itself is as endearingly odd.  In other hip hop songs, Thicke might sing the hook.  While “Shooter” has a repeated hook, Thicke feels more like the narrator pushing the story along with Wayne filling in the cracks with all of the details.  Wayne’s in his normal mode with rhymes coming straight out of his subconscious by going off on tangents with unorthodox similes.  In his second line, Wayne declares that “when I open up my mouth, all bullets come out,” and he certainly has a way with words.  However, at times, it feels like he’s Yosemite Sam shooting off his guns into the air with abandon.  Just when it seems like Wayne’s losing focus, he snaps back into lucidity and delivers a direct blow with the “stop being rapper-racists, region haters…” line directed at the business end of the industry.  On Leno, Wayne delivers this line directly into the camera.  Whether planned or instinctive, Wayne knew his best shot and took that extra second to aim at the target.  By that point, Wayne was on my radar.  Even with the mega-stardom that came along with Tha Carter III (and that surreal and wonderful interview he did with “Miss” Katie Couric), this TV performance I stumbled on accidentally remains my lasting image of Wayne.

More on Lil’ Wayne: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

EDIT: shityeahitscool shared a link to the video! Click through to check out the performance.