Throughout his career, Lil Wayne has given fans a number of potential answers to what the “F” in “Weezy F Baby” stands for since he introduced the nickname back in 2004, from “front door,” off of his and Drake’s “Miss Me” collaboration, to “finisher,” off “6 Foot 7 Foot.” One of the more popular answers happens to be a word that doesn’t start with the letter “F.” In his 2009 song “Yes,” Wayne raps “Weezy F. Baby, and the F is for phenomenal.” According to his longtime manager Cortez Bryant, the line was not intentional.
“The word starts with ‘ph,’ but he said ‘f,’ right?” Bryant said in an interview on Andrew Barber’s Fake Shore Drive show. “He was like, ‘Oh sh*t, I gotta change that.’ We released it. We had an argument about that. He not understanding the concept about digital, and it’s gone now…We had pressed tons of CDs, but he didn’t realize he spelled it wrong, and I didn’t catch it.”
Bryant then touched on Wayne’s passion for lyrics and wordplay. “Wayne is a perfectionist about that, using his words and prepositions in [the] correct way,” Bryant continued. “He might misspell something on purpose for lyrical exercise and wordplay, but he’s really precise about his wordplay. He was really down, pissed, ‘F*ck the whole mixtape’ just because of that one damn line.”
Bryant’s interview comes days after he discussed the possibility of a second Drake Vs. Lil Wayne tour on Brian “B.Dot” Miller’s Art of Facts Instagram show. “They talked about it,” he said. “I do think we need to do it again.”
You can watch Bryant’s interview in the video above. The “F for phenomenal” bit starts around the 19:11 mark.