Lupe Fiasco has discovered the whale scale that Jadakiss and Styles P rapped about on “We Gonna Make It.”
On “We Gonna Make It,” Jadakiss opens the song with the lines, “Fuck the frail shit, ‘cause when my coke comes in/ They gotta use the scale that they weight the whales with.” Since it dropped in 2001, hip-hop fans have repeated the line enough to wonder if such a scale even exists and where to find it.
Determined to get to the bottom of this hip-hop mystery, Lupe recorded himself (jokingly) asking an employee at SeaWorld about it during a recent trip. “I got a question from hip-hop,” said Lupe to the employee. “Where’s the scale they weigh the whales with?”
The employee launched into a long explanation of where the scale is and how it works. He ended the explanation by saying it’s in the “G pool,” prompting Lupe to let people watching the video know that’s where you discover the origin of a classic hip-hop line. “The whale scale is in the G pool if you ever wanted to know,” said Lupe with a smile.
Lupe’s admiration for hip-hop classics will be on display this fall when he teaches a course about hip-hop at John Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute.
Earlier this year, Lupe announced that he was “thrilled” to reveal his position at the school where he’ll be in a Distinguished Visiting Professor role. According to the rapper, he’ll be “teaching Rap as part of the groundbreaking new four-year hip-hop degree program led by the visionary professor Wendel Patrick.”
“I’ll continue my teaching at MIT and pursuing my fellowship at Yale while advancing Rap studies and practice into the upper echelons of higher education at large,” wrote Lupe when he announced the news.
