In Plain Sight will take a look at songs from popular albums or classics that, for one reason or another, seem to get overlooked–tracks hidden in plain sight. Gotta give the deep cuts their shine!
This week’s installment of In Plain Sight sprung from twofold inspiration. 1) I have been listening to a lot of vintage Wayne in memorial of the rapper that once was (spurred by his incoherent appearance on Drake’s “HYFR”) and 2) “Playing With Fire” was removed from Tha Carter 3′s tracklist due to a copyright dispute, which means it wasn’t on Spotify when I went hunting for it.
So, given that you can no longer procure “Playing With Fire” by legal means (if you illegally download a song that was removed from an album due to copyright infringement, do the two broken laws cancel each other out? Am I grossly misunderstanding our legal system? If a tree downloads a torrent in the woods, do the Rolling Stones’ lawyers hear it and sue?), here’s a little YouTube commemoration of one of Wayne’s finest album moments.
“Playing With Fire” is blistering nonsense, a careening freight train of punchlines and boasts that shows what Wayne was capable of creating at the tail end of his “best rapper alive” era. His flow is unpredictable, his voice an ever changing instrument, diving through different moods and levels of insanity as the track builds (possibly culminating in one of Wayne’s simultaneously greatest and least coherent moments, imploring haters to assassinate him like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). “Playing With Fire” puts all of Wayne’s greatest characteristics on display, mixing megalomania, paranoia, sex, and copious drugs into an exhilarating potion.
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