If you look for Billboard’s (Top 10) chart information on Lil Wayne’s latest single, or even if you read about the song online, you’ll find a title that sounds like a plaintive plea for acceptance: “Love Me.”
Go looking for the video on YouTube—actually, don’t—and you’ll find the song’s full title, which is neither plaintive nor a plea: “B‑‑ches Love Me.” It’s also shown that way on the track listing for the Lil Wayne album from whence it sprang, I Am Not a Human Being II. That three-word title alone tells us almost everything we need to know about the music it fronts. But because this is a Plugged In music review, I’m compelled to say a bit more. Just a bit, though, because vast lyrical swaths of Lil Wayne’s misogynistic ode to sexual objectification are utterly unprintable.
Guest rapper Drake boils down the essence of the obscenity-riddled song into this equation: As long as women are willing to have sex with me, it doesn’t matter what critics say. But, of course, he puts a more vulgar spin on it. We hear, “Yeah, long as my b‑‑ches love me/I can give a f‑‑‑ ’bout no hater.”
Most of the song involves Lil Wayne’s explicit, degrading braggadocio about various nameless, faceless, identity-less women who service him sexually … and endlessly, he’d have us believe. He repeatedly lets loose explicit descriptions of positions and bodily fluids, often relating to oral sex.
Meanwhile, drugs and alcohol serve as mind- and soul-numbing lubricants. “P‑‑‑y, money, weed, codeine,” Wayne brags, a surprisingly concise four-word summary of his entire musical catalog, actually.
When one human sex toy dares to suggest she’s interested in a real relationship with him, the result is arguably more tragic than the degradation he’s already inflicted upon her: “She said, ‘Cause I really need somebody/So tell me you’re that somebody’/’Girl, I f‑‑‑ who I want and I f‑‑‑ who I don’t’/ … She said, ‘I never want to make you mad/I just want to make you proud.” Wayne then replies with an unprintable reference to their just-completed copulation and tells her, “Then don’t make a sound.”
Elsewhere, Wayne graphically details elements of his concubines’ sexual anatomy, saying their willingness to surrender them to him disqualifies them from being treated as human beings. “Can’t treat these hos like ladies, man,” he says. Instead, Wayne and Drake et al act like pagan kings of old, using, abusing and disposing of women like so much worthless, meaningless chattel—and then dropping f-bombs on “haters” (a label I’ll proudly bear in this case) who’d suggest that there’s any problem with such a way of life.
A postscript: Not surprisingly, the song’s video reinforces the perception that Wayne believes women are to be treated as sex slaves. It features undulating, lingerie-wearing supplicants (some with bizarre serpentine tongues and snake-like contact lenses) writhing in cages, while others crawl suggestively toward Wayne on a bed surrounded by water.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
