Let’s get straight on something up front: the kids who pull off the bad-ass high school rebel thing pull it off because they realize they can screw around in high school and still succeed. The kids who keep talking about how they don’t care, actually care. They aren’t rebelling, they’re failing. And it’s annoying. And now Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa have done us the displeasure of recording an utterly boring and predictable song with no other purpose than this tired adolescent posturing.
The song starts bad and never recovers. (It’s even worse in the video below, beginning with a painful skit.) Bruno Mars guests for the chorus and opens “Young, Wild & Free” without any subtlety:
So what we get drunk?
So what we smoke weed?
We’re just having fun
We don’t care who sees
Now immediately there’s the obvious fact that they took the time to record the song and make it public, which is pretty good evidence that they do in fact care who sees. Maybe Wiz or Bruno could have pulled the wool over someone’s eyes with a line like this while they were actually in school, but on a single it smacks of disingenuous.
Perhaps it’s just a bad idea to expect any sort of honesty from the lyrics of a party anthem, but the problem is deeper than whether they care who knows. Neither Snoop nor Wiz drop any lines that carry any weight. They don’t actually sound like they even know how to party when measured by the current standard for weed smoking: the ridiculous things Lil Wayne says about…well, anything. This is especially atrocious for Snoop, one of the godfathers of rapping about weed.
Essentially, this song is devoid of any substance. Obviously glorifying teenage drug abuse isn’t much of a life lesson, but “Young, Wild & Free” can’t even abuse drugs properly. Snoop here is like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused except less interesting.
You know what?
It’s like I’m 17 again
Peach fuzz on my face
Snoop refuses to even take advantage of the fact he has a flow few can match and instead reverts to an unknowing and unskilled lyricist. Wiz, less surprisingly, can’t add much by way of rhymes either.
Roll joints bigger than King Kong’s fingers
And smoke them hoes down ’til they stingers
You a class clown and if I skip for the day
I’m with your bitch smoking grade A
The second half of this line is (sadly) the best in the song, but Wiz doesn’t even have the swagger to make it believable. And the first half sounds like something written by either a person who’s never seen a joint or someone who’s gone off the deep end.
That’s the thing about the people Snoop and Wiz are rapping to – they’re too busy trying to look like they don’t care to have the talent to get away with it. Of course Snoop does have the talent, but he doesn’t show it here and Wiz only brings him down. If this song came out twenty years ago, Snoop would have called himself out for being fake. And Wiz isn’t A$AP Rocky. He’s that kid you knew in high school who talked about being gangster while his mom bought his weed.
