Ludacris thrills fans with new Lil Wayne and Chance The Rapper collabs during Verzuz battle with Nelly
The hotly-anticipated Verzuz matchup between hip-hop legends Ludacris and Nelly certainly lived up to its billing on May 16. During the course of the Instagram Live battle on Saturday night, both Southern rap icons went toe-to-toe as they rolled out hit after hit from their time on the charts. After Nelly temporarily lost his net connection, Ludacris certainly made the 300,000-plus online viewers glad they had tuned in after he premiered a new collaboration with Lil Wayne called 'Silence Of The Lambs' and also teased some upcoming projects with Chance The Rapper and Timbaland.
The virtual Verzuz Instagram Live Battles have consistently been one of the hottest draws in contemporary music culture thus far during the quarantine period. Ever since Timbaland and Swizz Beatz pitted their beats against each other back in March, the fast-growing hip-hop Verzuz series has been attracting millions of online viewers every week. So far, we've seen epic showdowns between hip-hop legends that included Scott Storch vs Mannie Fresh, Babyface vs Teddy Riley, RZA vs DJ Premier, T-Pain vs Lil Jon and most recently, a duel between neo-soul queens Erykah Badu and Jill Scott.
For their Verzuz battle, Ludacris and Nelly went blow for blow, with each trading one legendary hit song for another as they sought to justify their chart supremacy throughout the last two decades. Nelly dropped the sizzling tracks 'Na-NaNa-Na', 'Ride With Me', 'Country Grammar' and 'Shake Ya Tailfeather', while Ludacris played the smash hits like 'My Chick Bad', 'Oh', 'Made You Look' and 'Yeah!' However, barely three songs into the battle, Nelly's Internet connection fizzled out, due to a storm in the St Louis area.
So whilst waiting for Nelly to rejoin the battle, the enterprising Ludacris played a new Lil Wayne collab called 'Silence Of The Lambs', which had been produced by Timbaland and included references to Bill Cosby, R Kelly and Roseanne Barr. “I love R Kelly, but around my daughters, I’m not comfortable,” Luda rapped in the first verse, besides referencing another sexual predator, “Bill Huxtable” and claiming that racists were still drinking “from Roseanne’s bar.” Lil Wayne could be heard on the second verse, and the hooky chorus included Ludacris bragging: “Rap brought me back to restore a little bit of balance."
Besides this electrifying new song, Ludacris also teased another upcoming collaboration with Chance The Rapper on the chorus and claimed he had more projects in the pipeline with producer Timbaland, saying "We got like 20 of these!" Naturally, the eager fans all lapped this up, with one saying "Ludacris PREPARED for this. Transitions! Talking points! Reminding us why he had the run he did." Another fan tweeted, "Ludacris has all these party records, but dude was really, really rapping though."
Most fans seemed to think that Ludacris had won this showdown, with one viewer posting, "Ludacris is a man of the people. He played all the records we wanted him to play." Another fan hilariously pointed out, "It's nice Nelly came to the Ludacris concert." There were also people who were super excited to hear that Ludacris and Timbaland had close to 20 upcoming projects, exclaiming, "Whoa, a whole Ludacris and Timbaland album?"
We can't wait to listen to more of these soon-to-be-released songs and we're sure the next Verzuz battle is going to be even more epic. Stay tuned for more hip-hop updates.
