Legendary rap artist Lil Wayne hits back at Ja Morant criticism

Legendary rapper and four-time Grammy-award winning artist Lil Wayne has weighed in on the ongoing Ja Morant gun criticism during an appearance on Showtime’s ‘All The Smoke’ Podcast.

Aside from his largely successful rap career, which has netted him a total of 143 awards and 211 nominations, Wayne also possesses a lengthy arrest record for multiple weapons charge.

During his appearance, Wayne made several strong points, with the most pertinent of them stemming from him saying that many of the people speaking on Morant do not actually know the player personally.

‘Do y’all know that boy? Cause I don’t,’ Wayne said emphatically. ‘I know him from dunking and jumping, and I only started knowing him when I started paying attention to him in his last year of college.

‘He come from a town with 3,000 people. Like, what? What y’all expect? Y’all gave him $200million. I just said, a town with 3,000 people. You expect him to be responsible? Now we tripping.

Morant has recently been suspended by the Grizzlies and is awaiting punishment from the NBA

He was filmed waving a pistol on the weekend (left) two months after filming himself doing the same thing in a Denver strip club (right)

‘That’s magic. Cause I could tell you now, I come from a real well-raised, beautiful mother, nice, you know what I mean?

‘My mama would bust her ass to make sure everything around me was nice, and I still was a knucklehead. I shot myself. And that young man, I could imagine if I came from a f***ing place with 3,000 people and I became who I am.’

It has been well documented that Wayne suffered a self-inflicted gun wound to the chest when he was a child. 

For years he had claimed the incident was an accident, only to eventually reveal that it was a nearly successful suicide attempt that saw his life saved by the split-second decisions of a police officer who choose to rush him to the hospital as opposed to waiting for an ambulance.

Despite his acclaimed musical career winning over 140 awards, Wayne also has had gun issues

He was pardoned in January 2021 by Donald Trump, after a December 2020 gun arrest in FL

Podcast co-host and 2003 NBA champion Stephen Jackson went on to follow up Wayne’s comments by simply stating ‘if they had social media when I was growing up I wouldn’t have made it.’

Earlier in the conversation, Wayne made other points around how Morant’s position as the bread winner within his squad also likely affects things.

‘The best I could do is remember when I was younger and my homies, my squad, my n***** around me, at the age where they don’t have money.

‘I’m the one with the money, and I don’t even know how much money I’ll end up with, but I’m the one with some money in my pocket — I know I got a bright future.

‘My homies, they ain’t on a payroll. They my homies, they live good when they with me. When I gotta go to work and all that, they gotta go back to being who they gotta be.

‘So I’m saying that to say, they in them streets and I was aware of that. So if I was going through something at that point in time, something public, I could imagine the rebellious attitude I would have if my homies is egging that attitude on.

‘I wish a n—a would tell me something. I look at like Zion [Williamson]. People begging him to lose weight and get in better shape, I wish a n—a would tell me something. You know how much money I got, boy? Just like this.’