If you were to trace the various and unexpected paths hip-hop has wandered in the past 10 or 15 years, you could do worse than to begin with Lil Wayne. In the sprawling, diffuse discography of this New Orleans-born artist is a pocket history of rap in the new century, from the heady posse-addled days of the late ’90s to the uneven and cynical major-label efforts that presaged the industry’s fall from grace, from the rise of online mix tapes to the confessional mode that still grips hip-hop today.
As a 15-year-old prodigy, Wayne joined the Hot Boys, the flamboyant Louisiana quartet — where, among other things, he coined the phrase “bling bling,” both giving a name to an age of rap excess and, perhaps more relevantly, providing the genre with one of its first great cheesy crossover moments into the lexicon of the rest of America. His early solo albums were sporadically great but more often unfocused and tossed off (they went gold anyway).
In 2005, Lil Wayne released “Tha Carter II,” a more ambitious record, and a stranger one — he rapped about sharks and clouds, slurred and scatted, stumbled and kept going. “Tha Carter II” began an era of productivity unlikely to be matched again by anyone anytime soon — mix tape after mix tape, punch line after punch line, his verses overflowing his ability to put them all in one place.
The record industry was in the midst of a slow collapse, and Wayne probably hastened it, changing the rules for rappers, who were suddenly compelled to release free music of their own if they wanted to keep up. And the raw, stream-of-consciousness vulnerability of Wayne’s mix tapes, to say nothing of their utter weirdness — the rapper was so high, he once bragged, he “could eat a star” — freed his peers to mine similar territory. Rap’s present landscape, dominated by manic-depressive types like Kanye West and Drake, owes a great deal to Lil Wayne.
In 2008, Wayne released “Tha Carter III,” and then exhaled for the first time in three years; dubious experiments with hard rock and the pitch-correction software Auto-Tune followed. The rapper spent most of last year in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, serving time on a gun charge. He emerged in November to a rap world dominated by his protégés Drake and Nicki Minaj, both signed to his Young Money imprint, and by his former rivals at the top of the game, Rick Ross, West and — more recently — Jay-Z.
Today, Lil Wayne releases “Tha Carter IV,” and once again he finds himself at the center of the rap zeitgeist. If the last five or six years in hip-hop have been characterized by big moments — typified by Kanye West’s brilliant 2010, which culminated in the release of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” — 2011, so far, seems to have a very different character. It is a year of good-but-not-great rap albums, made by rappers whose talent is proven but whose instincts may be less sharp than they used to be. “Watch the Throne,” the collaborative album West and Jay-Z released earlier this month, was such an album; “Tha Carter IV” is another.
His rapping is still nimble, his mind unlike any other. But in the months since Lil Wayne’s release from prison, he has been stuck in a kind of mental groove, returning again and again to the same narrow terrain. Sometimes, on “Tha Carter IV,” the rapper’s present tendency to repeat himself becomes literal — “John,” a battering, mean-faced collaboration with Rick Ross, is an undisguised remake of Ross’s own hit “I’m Not a Star.” And the album’s best song and first single, “6 Foot 7 Foot,” is a reworking (albeit an inspired one) of “A Milli,” Wayne’s own wacky 2008 breakthrough. He is as unfettered as ever, and creative too — “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna,” he raps on “6 Foot 7 Foot” — but the walls have moved back in a bit.
On “Tha Carter IV,” Wayne casts himself as a lover, a beach bum, a guy who’s “baseball rich,” president of the United States of America and “a gangster by choice.” “I hope my sons choose wiser,” he says in reference to the latter on “Nightmares of the Bottom,” before bragging, “I touch the sky, get the clouds out my fingernails.”
Once, Wayne could be counted on for this, flights of bruising introspection alternating with vivid trips into space. His voice remains his best asset, a rusty croak that can convey enthusiasm and whimsy, heartbreak and genuine delight in the same breath. But he’s not really stretching it here, and the scaffolding is more evident: Life, on “Tha Carter IV,” is a “movie I’ve seen too many times.” Perhaps that’s why it’s also a golf course, shorter than the rapper Bushwick Bill, “deep,” a gamble and also a roller coaster — “but still unfair.” For every moment of unexpected, delightful specificity — “I woke up this morning,” Wayne raps on the rousing “Abortion,” “ashed my blunt in my Grammy award” — there are as many replays of old highlights.
Then again, indiscriminately mixing pro forma and profound is a very Lil Wayne quality, even at his best. In an era when rap’s primary audience has become defuse, ephemeral and at times hard to even locate, Wayne’s non sequiturs often read like just another kind of commercial and artistic logic. One gets the sense that Lil Wayne is genuinely as interested in being a moderately good singer-songwriter — the part he plays on the incongruous, acoustic guitar-assisted single “How To Love” — as he is in being the best rapper alive, a title he’s also claimed from time to time.
He’s certainly not the best at the moment, though “Tha Carter IV” continues a conversation — call it an argument — that he and Jay-Z have been having for years now. On “It’s Good,” the album’s most efficient and purposeful song, Wayne responds to a recent subliminal insult from the elder rapper with a slightly more direct threat (it involves kidnapping Jay-Z’s wife).
But while Wayne is off battling other rappers, the two men he shares “I’m Good” with, Jadakiss and Drake, both rap more fluidly, and more to the point, on Wayne’s own song. It’s a typical moment for Wayne — absent and distracted when he can least afford it, and yet sharp when you least expect him to be.
Or, at times, even want him to be — there is, arguably, something dispiriting about Lil Wayne bothering to scrap with his peers over dominance when his brightest moments have always been the result of a more ethereal kind of talent. “Tha Carter IV” is solid effort from a very skilled rapper who, for the first time in a while, has tenuously placed both feet on the ground. Here’s hoping he finds a way to float off again soon.
> Download from iTunes
As a 15-year-old prodigy, Wayne joined the Hot Boys, the flamboyant Louisiana quartet — where, among other things, he coined the phrase “bling bling,” both giving a name to an age of rap excess and, perhaps more relevantly, providing the genre with one of its first great cheesy crossover moments into the lexicon of the rest of America. His early solo albums were sporadically great but more often unfocused and tossed off (they went gold anyway).
In 2005, Lil Wayne released “Tha Carter II,” a more ambitious record, and a stranger one — he rapped about sharks and clouds, slurred and scatted, stumbled and kept going. “Tha Carter II” began an era of productivity unlikely to be matched again by anyone anytime soon — mix tape after mix tape, punch line after punch line, his verses overflowing his ability to put them all in one place.
The record industry was in the midst of a slow collapse, and Wayne probably hastened it, changing the rules for rappers, who were suddenly compelled to release free music of their own if they wanted to keep up. And the raw, stream-of-consciousness vulnerability of Wayne’s mix tapes, to say nothing of their utter weirdness — the rapper was so high, he once bragged, he “could eat a star” — freed his peers to mine similar territory. Rap’s present landscape, dominated by manic-depressive types like Kanye West and Drake, owes a great deal to Lil Wayne.
In 2008, Wayne released “Tha Carter III,” and then exhaled for the first time in three years; dubious experiments with hard rock and the pitch-correction software Auto-Tune followed. The rapper spent most of last year in New York City’s Rikers Island jail, serving time on a gun charge. He emerged in November to a rap world dominated by his protégés Drake and Nicki Minaj, both signed to his Young Money imprint, and by his former rivals at the top of the game, Rick Ross, West and — more recently — Jay-Z.
Today, Lil Wayne releases “Tha Carter IV,” and once again he finds himself at the center of the rap zeitgeist. If the last five or six years in hip-hop have been characterized by big moments — typified by Kanye West’s brilliant 2010, which culminated in the release of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” — 2011, so far, seems to have a very different character. It is a year of good-but-not-great rap albums, made by rappers whose talent is proven but whose instincts may be less sharp than they used to be. “Watch the Throne,” the collaborative album West and Jay-Z released earlier this month, was such an album; “Tha Carter IV” is another.
His rapping is still nimble, his mind unlike any other. But in the months since Lil Wayne’s release from prison, he has been stuck in a kind of mental groove, returning again and again to the same narrow terrain. Sometimes, on “Tha Carter IV,” the rapper’s present tendency to repeat himself becomes literal — “John,” a battering, mean-faced collaboration with Rick Ross, is an undisguised remake of Ross’s own hit “I’m Not a Star.” And the album’s best song and first single, “6 Foot 7 Foot,” is a reworking (albeit an inspired one) of “A Milli,” Wayne’s own wacky 2008 breakthrough. He is as unfettered as ever, and creative too — “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna,” he raps on “6 Foot 7 Foot” — but the walls have moved back in a bit.
On “Tha Carter IV,” Wayne casts himself as a lover, a beach bum, a guy who’s “baseball rich,” president of the United States of America and “a gangster by choice.” “I hope my sons choose wiser,” he says in reference to the latter on “Nightmares of the Bottom,” before bragging, “I touch the sky, get the clouds out my fingernails.”
Once, Wayne could be counted on for this, flights of bruising introspection alternating with vivid trips into space. His voice remains his best asset, a rusty croak that can convey enthusiasm and whimsy, heartbreak and genuine delight in the same breath. But he’s not really stretching it here, and the scaffolding is more evident: Life, on “Tha Carter IV,” is a “movie I’ve seen too many times.” Perhaps that’s why it’s also a golf course, shorter than the rapper Bushwick Bill, “deep,” a gamble and also a roller coaster — “but still unfair.” For every moment of unexpected, delightful specificity — “I woke up this morning,” Wayne raps on the rousing “Abortion,” “ashed my blunt in my Grammy award” — there are as many replays of old highlights.
Then again, indiscriminately mixing pro forma and profound is a very Lil Wayne quality, even at his best. In an era when rap’s primary audience has become defuse, ephemeral and at times hard to even locate, Wayne’s non sequiturs often read like just another kind of commercial and artistic logic. One gets the sense that Lil Wayne is genuinely as interested in being a moderately good singer-songwriter — the part he plays on the incongruous, acoustic guitar-assisted single “How To Love” — as he is in being the best rapper alive, a title he’s also claimed from time to time.
He’s certainly not the best at the moment, though “Tha Carter IV” continues a conversation — call it an argument — that he and Jay-Z have been having for years now. On “It’s Good,” the album’s most efficient and purposeful song, Wayne responds to a recent subliminal insult from the elder rapper with a slightly more direct threat (it involves kidnapping Jay-Z’s wife).
But while Wayne is off battling other rappers, the two men he shares “I’m Good” with, Jadakiss and Drake, both rap more fluidly, and more to the point, on Wayne’s own song. It’s a typical moment for Wayne — absent and distracted when he can least afford it, and yet sharp when you least expect him to be.
Or, at times, even want him to be — there is, arguably, something dispiriting about Lil Wayne bothering to scrap with his peers over dominance when his brightest moments have always been the result of a more ethereal kind of talent. “Tha Carter IV” is solid effort from a very skilled rapper who, for the first time in a while, has tenuously placed both feet on the ground. Here’s hoping he finds a way to float off again soon.
> Download from iTunes
