Jerry Seinfeld and Wale are friends.
Perhaps you were unaware of this? Don't feel bad. The 60-year-old comedian and 30-year-old rapper aren't exactly an obvious couple.
But Seinfeld is all over Wale's new disc, The Album About Nothing, in the form of original voice recordings. The two met in 2008 after Wale rapped about Seinfeld, and have shared an unbreakable bond ever since.
Complex had the excellent idea of sitting the two down for coffee (a la Seinfeld) and discussing various topics. The conversation began with shoe talk:
W: I've lost 500 sneakers. I have two sneaker rooms, one in L.A. and one in Jersey. And I have what is essentially a sneaker room in my mother's house.
JS: Why is it so important? To feel right?
W: I don't know. White shoes make me happy. Remember? There's a song on the album called "White Shoes." On it, Jerry says he was wearing white shoes and a lady stopped him on the street and asked him why he liked white shoes. He said, "I don't know. They make me happy." The idea for the record was to call it "White Shoes" because, where we come from, it's such a vanity thing. That's the first thing a woman would notice on you, the shoes.
JS: They say you judge a man by his wife, his car, and his shoes. Those three things will tell you everything you need to know him. I got into white sneakers because of Billy "White Shoes" Johnson and Joe Namath. Those were the two guys wearing white in the NFL. All of a sudden, the game had a lot more flair.
Asked by the moderator what's tougher: to rap on the spot or be funny on the spot, the boys were in agreement:
W: Probably to be funny. Because you gotta play off somebody's emotions. Being a comedian is probably the most pressure, next to being a quarterback in New York City or something like that.
JS: Yeah. [Laughs.] I do this thing in my show where I say, "I know there's a lot of people here because somebody wanted to go and you said, 'If you want to go, I'll go.' You didn't really want to go." There's always a lot of,"You want to go, I'll go" people. So I acknowledge them.
On The Album About Nothing, Seinfeld often plays the cool, calm narrator to Wale, who wigs out about various things. This dynamic really comes out during their Complex conversation about Twitter haters.
W: I try to rationalize with people. Like, "Why do you feel this way?"
JS: Who cares!?
W: I don't know. Nine times out of 10, when I respond, I just want to find out what's the root of it. Somebody says, "If I f--k with him, he's gonna react." What then? Did you win any money? Did your life become better? Why would you do that? Why is this entertaining to you? I just don't understand why.
JS: Yeah, well I have a terrace at my apartment and it's fantastic. You have to come see it sometime. Every time I go out on that terrace I think, Maybe I'll jump. [Wale laughs.] Because if I jump, the list of things I don't have to do is so long, the issues I don't have to deal with. All I have to do is jump and everything is taken care of! Now, I don't jump. But I don't care to know why I want to jump. What's the difference why? The mind is not that great.
Wale dropped a trailer (featuring Jerry) for the new album in September. Check it out below:
