What's Wrong With Them

What's Wrong With Them — Lil Wayne Featuring Nicki Minaj (2010)

"What's Wrong With Them" appeared on I Am Not a Human Being, the mixtape-album hybrid that Young Money/Cash Money Records released in September 2010 while Lil Wayne was serving an eight-month prison sentence at Rikers Island in New York. The timing of the release was deliberate and commercially sophisticated: Wayne had been sentenced to jail time following a weapons charge, and the label opted to release new material during his incarceration to maintain his commercial presence and keep his audience engaged during the extended absence from public life. The project succeeded in that goal, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 and demonstrating that Wayne's commercial power remained intact even when he could not physically be present to promote it.

The album was recorded entirely before Wayne's incarceration, with sessions drawn from a prolific creative period that had produced an enormous volume of material. Wayne's productivity during the late 2000s was well-documented, and I Am Not a Human Being drew from that surplus to assemble a project that, while categorized as a mixtape in some contexts, achieved full commercial album status in terms of its chart performance and label promotional investment. The Billboard 200 debut at number one with first-week sales that placed it among the year's most commercially successful hip-hop releases was a remarkable achievement for a project released under such unusual circumstances.

Nicki Minaj's appearance on "What's Wrong With Them" came at a pivotal moment in her own career trajectory. Her debut album Pink Friday was released in November 2010, just weeks after I Am Not a Human Being, and she was in the process of transitioning from her established reputation as one of hip-hop's most formidable female rappers, largely built through mixtape releases and features on other artists' records, to fully fledged mainstream pop-rap superstar. The Wayne feature was part of a dense schedule of collaborative appearances that helped build pre-release anticipation for her own project.

The creative relationship between Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj had been well-established before "What's Wrong With Them." Minaj had been signed to Wayne's Young Money label and had appeared on multiple Wayne-affiliated projects, developing a working chemistry with him that made their collaborative recordings feel like natural extensions of an ongoing creative conversation rather than transactional guest appearances. That familiarity is audible in their performances on the track, which have an ease and playfulness that reflects genuine creative comfort.

The production aesthetic of I Am Not a Human Being was largely in keeping with the maximalist, energetic hip-hop production that had characterized Wayne's output through the late 2000s: dense, layered beats with plenty of bass, crisp production that translated effectively across the speakers on which hip-hop of this era was primarily consumed. "What's Wrong With Them" fits within that sonic framework while showcasing the contrasting lyrical styles of its two performers.

Wayne's technical facility as a rapper had been widely recognized as exceptional since his breakthrough into mainstream visibility, and the recordings made before his incarceration showed him at a genuinely high level of creative output. His delivery on I Am Not a Human Being's tracks carried the confidence of an artist who was both commercially dominant and artistically assured, and "What's Wrong With Them" reflects that quality alongside Minaj's own impressive technical performance.

The commercial context of the album's release during Wayne's imprisonment also reflects the specific economics of hip-hop in 2010, a transitional period when physical sales were declining but digital downloads and streaming were not yet fully dominant as commercial metrics. The project's first-week numbers, achieved through a combination of digital sales and traditional retail, demonstrated that an artist of Wayne's commercial stature could maintain consumer interest and purchasing behavior even during a prolonged absence from public promotional activity.

The track and the album it belongs to remain significant documents of a specific moment in hip-hop history: the Wayne-dominated late 2000s and early 2010s, and the beginning of Nicki Minaj's emergence as a dominant force in her own right. Both developments are captured within the recording, giving it historical value beyond its merits as a specific piece of music.