Image by Peter Fowler.
In 1958, Little Richard caused a minor stir by singing, “Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball.” Everyone thought the flamboyant rock ‘n’ roll pioneer—who today would probably be known as Lil Richard—was talking about sex. But in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, he insisted balling was dancing back in the Eisenhower era.
Ballin' never means dancing in rap songs. Typically, a baller is: (a) literally an athlete who plays a sport involving a ball or (b) a person who makes lots of money and lives large. These definitions, of course, are not mutually exclusive. As the HBO series Ballers reminds us, if you’re (a), you’re probably (b), too.
But like the show’s protagonist, retired football player turned financial manager, Spencer Strasmore (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) often tries to teach his clients, it’s easy to be led astray in the baller lifestyle if you’re not smart with your money. So we took a look at some of our favorite lyrics over the years to see how the term has evolved and learn what’s the best way to ball.
As far as rap slang goes, “ballin’” is a perennial favorite that bounces through eras and never goes out of style. According to the Genius lyrics database, there are 1498 rap lyrics that either use the term “ballin'” or “baller.” The the first usage of “ballin’” in hip-hop is N.W.A.’s 1990 song “100 Miles and Runnin’.” The track finds the members of N.W.A. trying to elude the FBI and make it back to their hometown of Compton. On the track, Eazy-E raps:
Just like Carl Lewis, I’m ballin’ the fuck out
Eazy is talking about flexing his way through every city he passes en route to the CPT. He’s also be referencing the fact that Olympic track-and-field star Carl Lewis was drafted by the Chicago Bulls and the Dallas Cowboys in 1984, despite having played neither basketball nor football in college.
Throughout the early ‘90s, “ballin’” was a favorite term of West Coast rappers. On his 1992 classic “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” Dr. Dre raps about his friend turned foe Eazy:
Tighter than a mothafucka with the gangsta beats
And we was ballin’ on the motherfucking Compton streets
It’s a powerful image that wannabe gangstas would naturally want to emulate. That’s why Skee-Lo longs to be “a baller” (and “a little bit taller”) on his 1995 pipsqueak’s lament “I Wish.”
2Pac comes off as the polar opposite of Skee-Lo on 1996’s “Hail Mary,” wherein he raps about wishing he could leave the gangsta life behind:
We ballin', catch me, Father, please
‘Cause I’m fallin' in the liquor store
By the late ’90s, West Coast G-funk had given way to the East Coast bling-rap personified by Diddy. The erstwhile Puff Daddy opens his 1997 smash “It’s All About the Benjamins” with the question:
Now, what y'all wanna do?
Wanna be ballers? Shot-callers? Brawlers
The answer in Diddy’s shiny-suit era was an emphatic “yes” to all three, as the term “baller” became more aspirational than ever. It’s one thing to wish you could own the streets like Dre; it’s another dream of partying on a yacht with the Bad Boy crew. This was, after all, the height of the ‘90s, the economy was booming and it felt like everyone would get a chance to ball out.
In the new millennium, hip-hop’s epicenter shifted to the south, and the world met a whole new breed of ballers. “It ain’t nothing to a baller, baby, pay the cost,” raps Cash Money co-founder Birdman on 2002’s “What Happened to That Boy.” In 2000, Birdman co-produced, co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the film Baller Blockin’. The all-star cast includes Lil Wayne, who used a variation of the titular phrase in his 2000 track “Shine”:
Niggas steady baller block, can’t take nothing from us
Having haters try to snatch your wealth isn’t the only downside to being young, rich, and famous. On 2003’s “Roses,” Big Boi of OutKast meets a gold-digging hottie who straight-up asks him, “Pardon me, are you ballin’?” That sets a negative tone for the rest of their conversation, as Big Boi figures she’s trying to play him for a sucker and switches to defense. (Big Boi’s a true baller, so he can make that change effortlessly.)
The all-time gold-digger jam came along two years later in the form of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” In the third verse, ‘Ye implores the song’s duplicitous female subject to stick by her broke-ass man, even though—plot twist—he’s just as dirty a schemer.
I know there’s dudes ballin', and yeah, that’s nice
And they gonna keep callin' and tryin', but you stay right, girl
And when you get on, he’ll leave yo' ass for a white girl.”
There’s way less romantic treachery on Jim Jones’s 2006 banger “We Fly High,” a master class in ballin’. The Dipset rapper hops G4 flights, makes it rain buckets at the strip club, and rocks an Audemars Piguet watch with $100K worth of diamonds. The closest most of us will come to experiencing that lifestyle is rapping along with the celebratory chorus:
We fly high, no lie, you know this (Ballin'!)
Foreign rides outside, it’s like showbiz (We in the building)
Nearly a decade on from “Shine,” Lil Wayne flexes vocabulary first and foremost on 2009’s “Steady Mobbin’,” his collaboration with Gucci Mane off the We Are Young Money compilation. Weezy ends the chorus by insisting, “Oh Kemosabe, big ballin' is my hobby.” That line is swiped from the 1998 Big Tymers jam “Big Ballin’,” but it’s the kind of weird and braggy thing you’d expect from Wayne’s twisted mind.
But ballin’ isn’t just about being extravagant—it can also be about intelligence. JAY-Z likens himself to Plato on “No Church In the Wild,” off he and Kanye’s 2011 Watch The Throne album. Just as Plato carried on the legacy of his teacher, Socrates, Hova has talked about picking up where The Notorious B.I.G. left off.
I’m out here ballin’, I know y'all hear my sneaks
Jay cleverly working a hoops metaphor into a line that’s really about being alive and making bank and writing the kind of detailed lyrics that get people reaching for their copies of Plato’s Euthyphro.
Another rapper who warrants a Genius annotation with practically every line is Kendrick Lamar. K-Dot flipped mainstream materialistic rap on its head in the ‘10s by cultivating an image rooted in wisdom and integrity. Witness these bars on 2015’s “King Kunta”:
And if I gotta brown-nose for some gold
Then I’d rather be a bum than a motherfuckin' baller (Oh yeah!)
Kendrick reminds us there’s often a price to ballin’, and it’s not one he’s willing to pay. That’s evidently not an issue for Post Malone, who tells us he’s been “ballin’ since a baby” on his 2016 hit “Congratulations.” Posty broke out in 2015 with “White Iverson,” a reference to NBA bad boy Allen Iverson, his favorite player. Malone rolls all the meanings of “baller” into one bar:
I’m ballin', I’m ballin', Iverson on you
Malone might’ve been ballin' since birth, but for everyone else, it’s something you must work toward. Fronting like a baller before you’re ready can lead to big problems, as Spencer Strasmore, Dwayne Johnson’s character on Ballers, might tell his clients. Logic would agree. On his 2019 track “Mama / Show Love,” Young Sinatra offers up some sound advice for would-be flossers everywhere: “Save yo money, don’t think about a Beamer/‘Til ya sellin’ out arenas.”
Tune in to fifth season of Ballers Sunday, August 25 at 10:30pm on HBO.
