You can’t tell the story of Wale Folarin without Jerry Seinfeld. All the way back to his early mixtapes, the DC MC would reference ‘the show about nothing’, weaving segments from Seinfeld into his songs. It was fresh and distinct, especially considering you wouldn’t immediately associate Seinfeld with hip-hop.
Eventually, by 2015, the pair became good friends and worked on The Album About Nothing accordingly. In a 2015 interview with GQ, Folarin explained how, after he received his first Grammy nomination and number one album on Billboard, it was the right time to pursue a collaboration with the comedian. When the pair met backstage after a show, he found Wale to be a “very charming young man.”
“And then I heard about the mixtape, and he came up with the idea of doing the whole album. It just felt so offbeat and that’s what appeals to me,” Seinfeld told The New York Times in 2015. “Wale, to me, he has a little bit of hypnotic sound in his voice. There’s a richness to his emotion. When you listen to the music, you can feel what he’s feeling and I like that. Great singing always has that.”
Wale Details the Making of His 2015 Record ‘The Album About Nothing’
For the “Ambition” rapper, he was just being himself in the moment. A fast friendship was built, and they eventually worked together in a small studio in New York. When the album was done, the review was glowing from Seinfeld. “He loved it. And he called me one of his favorite rappers of all time. He and his wife were saying that they were really excited about it after talking to him,” he recalled.
Despite their friendship, there were some things that even Wale couldn’t get Seinfeld on board with. “I tried to put him on wrestling, but I don’t know if I sold him good enough. But I’m gonna try to take him to an actual wrestling show one day,” he said.
What he picked up immediately was how quickly the comedic actor can riff on anything and everything. It even extended to trendy words and phrases like “on fleek” you probably couldn’t even imagine Seinfeld saying.
“He’s very quick on his feet. He’s very, very, very witty. It was just fun for me to get into a bit of banter with each other, cause we’re both really on top of it like that. He can pick up on what a word means by just talking,” Wale said. “I think maybe that day I was probably talking to someone else about something and he heard it. Like he often takes stuff that I say to somebody else and uses it back to me surprisingly.”
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