I Ain't Got Time!

Album: Flower Boy (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Here, Tyler The Creator mainly raps about his successful career and his dismissal of people who are only interested in him because of what he has achieved. However there was one lyric on a completed different topic that fans immediately zeroed in on:

    Next line will have 'em like 'whoa'
    I been kissing white boys since 2004


    The lyric stirred speculation over whether it represented Tyler coming out, especially as he also appears to allude to his sexuality on another Flower Boy track "Garden Shed," where he drops the lines, "All my friends was lost. They couldn't read the signs. I didn't want to talk. I tell 'em my location and they ain't want to walk."
  • Tyler actually wrote the song for Kanye West, when the Life Of Pablo rapper was asleep but West dismissed the tune.

    "I remember being at Ye's during The Life Of Pablo [sessions] and I think he went to take a nap," Tyler told Zane Lowe on Beats 1. "I was in the studio and there was this MPC there. Noah –it's his enginner- started recording me. I just started smacking, started clapping, making weird noises, added a 'boom boom boom', and I was gonna add a hook. It was just that. I was like, 'Damn, Kanye should take this song. He would sound so much cooler saying that hook.' He didn't like it."
  • The track kicks off with a sample of Bel-Sha-Zaar's 1969 cut "Introduction." The song has been borrowed from for a number of other cuts, most famously Deee-Lite's 1990 hit tune "Groove Is in the Heart." Tyler recalled to Zane Lowe:

    "That was two different beats, I heard the Deee-Lite song on the radio with Q-Tip years ago… I suck at sampling so I just looped it and was like 'This is cool.' Added some drums to it and then it was a beat.

    So I had these two songs just sitting. And when I work on an album, I work on the same 15 songs for two years, basically. And I had these two songs and I'm like, I don't know which one should go as that banger on here: the sample one or the 'I ain't got time.' And one day, I was like, 'You know what? I'ma mix these two together. Spent three days tryna perfect mixing together."

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