T-Pain was only 23 when he rhymed mansion with Wiscansin…
If you’ve spent any considerable time on the internet in the last few years you’ve probably seen the above quote in a meme. Today I’m not deconstructing the meme’s origin-the most popular source comes from Twitter user @vinnycrack in a 2017 reply to learning Sir Isaac Newton’s age when he discovered the law of gravity-this is RapGEO, so I’m mapping the source of the quote itself, T-Pain’s “Can’t Believe It”, the lead single from his third album Three Ringz.
I thought this would be a fitting map for three reasons: 1) it’s mid-February and this song definitely makes the Valentine’s Day playlist; 2) this year will mark the 15th anniversary of the song’s release; and 3) the song is very much still relevant. The meme took off so well T-Pain began selling University of Wiscansin merch (which I still need to purchase for Mrs. Smithsonian and I) and people are still quoting it to this day.
This map was relatively simple to put together. In the song T-Pain mentions four places he can take his woman to: a log cabin in Aspen, Colorado; a mansion “somewhere in Wiscansin”, a condo in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and a beach house on the “edge of Costa Rica”. Each location was mapped as its own point layer, symbolized as close as I could get using open source .svg files. Of course I couldn’t finish the map without giving special attention to the State of Wisconsin/Wiscansin, symbolized in the red from the University of Wisconsin’s colorway. I didn’t incorporate Lil’ Wayne’s verse in the map, but he mentions the Cayman Islands.
Rap GEO 