Even a storyteller like Lil Wayne feels a pang of jealousy when he hears an Eminem line he wishes he had written himself.
For a couple of months now, Lil Wayne has hosted The Joint Venture Show with Sports Talk Radio Hall of Famer Craig Carton. Lil Wayne has stories to tell, Craig Carton has tons of interviewing experience and brings structure to their conversations. This time, he also raised a question about lyric envy in the rap world.
In 2023, Eminem shouted out Lil Wayne, praising his line on YG and Tyga’s track “Brand New”:
Bro Wayne just said “got a bunch of zeros like a bag of new funyuns!!” FUCK why didn’t I think of that????
Carton used this post as a segue to ask Lil Wayne whether he had ever felt jealous of someone else’s line. Apparently, it happens more often than one might think.
It doesn’t even have to be a rap line. It can just be literally anything. You or somebody on the show says a phrase, and I’ll be like, “Why didn’t I think of that?!” Plenty of times. And Eminem is a usual suspect of that, actually. He has plenty of lines that I would say, “Oh my, how did I not think of that?!”
The level of respect between these two rappers is remarkable. From their collaborations on “No Love”, “Drop the World”, and “Forever” to their later conversation on Lil Wayne’s podcasts, both Eminem and Lil Wayne connect at a creative level that can only be reached by honing their craft for decades.