In either case, it's certainly early in the Wayne Auto-Tune era, which is notable because that era would define the next phase of radio and mark one of Wayne's biggest stylistic contributions to music. Both Wikipedia and Noisey remix expert Al Shipley ( writing for Complex) contend that this is one of Wayne's first Auto-Tune experiments, and, while I can't definitively verify that, the timeline checks out. Wayne, meanwhile, does all the absurd shit that makes him such a legendary guest. Oh my god! Everyone goes nuts on it! And Shawty Lo sounds amped that everyone showed up! He even makes a Trap or Die reference in honor of Jeezy, who repays the favor by reminding us that he doesn't give a fuck about his haters, either. One of those was a Dirty South version that features Ludacris, Young Jeezy, Plies, and Lil Wayne. Like many major songs with a beat so good you want to hear everyone on it, 'Dey Know' prompted not one but two all-star remixes (there's another with E-40). Let's go ahead and acknowledge that beat, by Balist Beats and Born Immaculate, as one of the all time greats and point to Shawty Lo's declaration big upping all his haters as one of rap's most important messages.

Which, in Shawty Lo's case, was his landmark hit 'Dey Know,' a song that absolutely crushed radio and (from what I gather, having been 18 at the time) clubs. And then there's Wayne, rapping in absolutely giddy circles: 'Old money, new work / Lil coke on my gums like my tooth hurt / They from the red clay, I'm from that brown dirt.'Īs badass as 'I'm Da Man' is, though, it's a little like batting practice for these guys, just a chance to hop in, demolish a beat, and then move onto the next thing. The song's booming hook of 'Got no wife but the white be my girlfriend' is perfectly of 2007, but if anything it sounds more current today, when we can all acknowledge how prescient this sound was (at the time it was quite divisive!). Among other credentials, there's an obvious stylistic tie between his slurry, goofily upbeat twist on street rap and that of his occasional collaborator Gucci Mane, who also appears on I'm Da Man. Shawty Lo, of course, was instrumental in both-his group D4L are the definitive snap artists, and his album Units in the City is widely seen as a trap classic. It's an interesting song in retrospect, too, because it falls at more or less an ideal midpoint of snap music, the elastic party rap subgenre that had ruled Atlanta and radio at large for the previous couple of years, and trap, the ascendant mafioso rap subgenre that continues to rule Atlanta and radio at large today.

Shawty lo they know remix