A Year of Lil Wayne: Kelly Rowland’s “Motivation”

Day 188: “Motivation” feat. Lil Wayne – Kelly Rowland, Here I Am, 2011

At the risk of giving away some of the behind-the-scenes magic that comes with building a blog post about Lil Wayne every day, often part of the process, when there is a music video to draw upon, is taking a screenshot of said music video. Having done this at a minimum of several dozen times, I have two trends to point out about Lil Wayne in music videos: First, there are of him rapping in dimly lit warehouses. Second, they all have him cocking his head back against a wall and rapping laconically like this:

But let’s not get sidetracked. “Motivation,” the first collaboration between Lil Wayne and Kelly Rowland since Destiny’s Child’s “Soldier,” was a reasonably big hit and a critical success released in 2011. It led such notable journalistic outlets as the Dallas Observer to, um, observe that , and it led Kelly herself to note that Lil Wayne is “just an artist that loves music. You can tell that just by how genius he is on his records.” She went on to add, “I was hoping he would love the record. And you can tell that it vibed with him or it connected with him in some sort of way for him to do what he did on this record because when I got it back—I literally was at a loss for words.”

You might chalk this reaction up to Kelly Rowland enthusiastically promoting her new single, but I would prefer to be enthused about Kelly Rowland being a Lil Wayne fan. And he does turn in a good verse, with one of his best oral sex punchlines: “I put her on my plate / then I do the dishes.” Come on! That’s funny! Anyway, this is a good Lil Wayne pop hit that I had to blog about because I was trying to come up with ideas for A Year of Lil Wayne and, in that context, there is no ignoring the line “rain on my head / call that brainstorming.”

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