In “C.R.E.A.M.,” Method chants the following ( emphasis mine): Second, Akon doesn’t quote the entire chorus.

Akon is showing us something we thought we knew, but in a different light. The most obvious effect is that it forces our attention to a different spot in the sentence than in the original. “… cash rules everything around me.” Sound it out in your head see if I’m right. “Cash rules everything … around me.” Why does Akon do this? Sure, it helps the line scan as part of the overall chorus, but he could have achieved the same effect by waiting a beat on that second line. Method’s invocation sounds like “CASH rules everything aROUND me.” Akon’s sounds like “cash rules EV’ryTHING / aROUND ME.” There’s a caesura between “everything” and “around” that breaks the line up into two separate sentences. Dolla dolla bills, y’all.īut two things distinguish this chorus from the chorus of the original “C.R.E.A.M.”įirst (and credit to Jordan Stokes for bringing this to my attention), Akon puts emphasis on different syllables than Method Man does. Then we get to the refrain and we understand why. Remember the intro to the song and how many times Wyclef repeats the word “bill.” He’s suffusing us with a sense of money. There is no escaping the influence of money. The story of the Sweetest Girl is that cash rules everything around me. Homer was talking about the ways that fate can screw over a good man’s life: how we’re all the pawns of forces more powerful than ourselves. Wyclef isn’t just telling one girl’s story any more than Homer was recounting these crazy things that happened to Odysseus this one time. And like an epic, the story is about more than just one hero’s journey. He’s recounting one girl’s odyssey: from high schooler, to newcomer on the streets, to embittered prostitute. Wyclef and Akon’s verses inherit the most ancient literary tradition of the West: the epic poem. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Does anything else in the Western canon do that? An invocation of a divine source of creativity. Where else do we see that? A didactic declaration of the theme. This is, again, to add the weight of elder wisdom to Akon’s pronouncement. “I’mma tell you like Wu told me.” He doesn’t need to explain that “Wu” is short for “Wu-Tang,” which in turn is short for “The Wu-Tang Clan,” who were not in fact Mandarin martial artists from the Ming Dynasty but a crew of hardcore rappers out of Staten Island. He’s passing on wisdom he received from another source. But now I’m TELLING you.īut Akon isn’t just telling you. I was just describing the unfortunate story of this girl, the Sweetest Girl. The phrase “ run and tell that” does not mean, literally, “stop listening to me, sprint away and deliver this news to someone else.” It means “believe what I’m saying as you would an urgent truth.” See also the African-American spiritual “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” etc. We see this distinction elsewhere in black culture in the U.S. Everything else was just setting the scene. “I’mma tell you …” Why doesn’t he just say it? Akon is calling the audience to attention: listen close now, he says. He tells you what he’s going to tell you. Akon doesn’t just drop another rapper’s verse into his song. Wyclef and Akon invokes some of the most powerful names in hip-hop – Jay-Z, GoodFellas and Wu-Tang – to hammer their point home. Again, this ties into the overall theme: teaching a lesson about poverty using the wisdom of the elders. Only Niia, the female vocalist who sings a descant over some of the song, comes from the Eastern seaboard: Needham, MA. Akon hails from Senegal, Africa Wyclef was born in Haiti and Lil’ Wayne represents the Dirty South (specifically New Orleans). Which is noteworthy since only one of the artists on this track is from the East Coast. Of note: this particular phrasing is almost identical to the Notorious B.I.G.’s call-back to “C.R.E.A.M.” on his posthumous track, “Notorious Thugs.” So this reference touches on two of the titans of East Coast rap: the Wu-Tang Clan and Biggie Smalls. The giants in the earth, the men of renown.

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