Intro by Jonah Weiner
Opinion: Josh Eells
Opinion: Robert Christgau
Opinion: Jonah Weiner
Opinion II: Nick Sylvester
Opinion II: Josh Eells
Opinion II: Robert Christgau
POLL: Which track on Tha Carter III do YOU think is the best?


Josh Jonah Bob —  

I like to shit in the sink every now and then, too; that doesn't make me a Martian. Let's talk "Phone Home", wherein our hero recycles his fourth-best line from his 2006 "Show Me What You Got" freestyle and uses it for his jump-off; wherein he makes preemptive reference to his physical likeness to E.T. (though I always thought the dreads put him in Predator's camp); wherein Wayne plays the Martian card against anyone who dares compare or cramp or criticize: "We are not the same/ I am a Martian." Well! As someone who makes a buck off the occasional stunt, I feel obliged to point out that I hold my Martians to a high standard.  

It's a tall claim for any artist to make, that he's beyond criticism. That one's style is so bastardly, so autonomous and/or hermetically sealed, that to hate is to not-fathom. I'll ride — I always do — but you better take me somewhere good. Remember when Will Smith said the parents just don't understand? Then just sorta left it at that? What a prince. With Bel-Air he even gave parents a second chance to get with it (I refuse to use the J-word), and you better believe Beth and Barry Sylvester had the rap game figured out by the time Jim West got "Wild Wild" in 1999. Which is to say, there was nothing more Will Smith wanted in this world than for parents to understand. They gave up after "Big Willie Style," of course. So did Big Willie.  

Likewise, remember that post-Smith rapper named Young Jeezy. In 2005 the Atlanta rapper wrote off his lazy pen as evidence of street tough. What fools we were! No true trapper has the time to write good lyrics! Hardly a seamless garment, gangsta rap came apart because suspension of disbelief became passe, yet Jeezy made those rags work for him, wore them like a wave cap. "Denzel Washington-ass niggas, that's what I call them," Jeezy said on Can't Ban the Snowman. "They good actors." Am I the Dr. Dre of rap critics? Maybe the Q-Tip? I ride! You always let me. And like you, just like you, I enjoyed exploring the ins and/or outs of another myth of authenticity, not to debunk but to swim in it, not to ethnologize but to draw the dots from rap's self-immolating fix for the real to Oprah's long knives for James Frey to the rapid proliferation of gonzo porn to the heavy-edit paradox of reality television. We gave each other space and not the evil eye. On and on and on.  

But so, anyway, Martians. Lil Wayne. Tha Carter III. "Phone Home" is as close as we're gonna get to an entry point into Wayne's World. We can try to divine his one-liners for some kind of sequential logic: "Like I bought it from Target" into "Hip-hop is my supermarket/ Shopping cart full of fake hip-hop artists" into "I'm starving, sorry, I gotta eat all it/ And I be back in the mornin'" makes sense to me, coming from the Rapper Eater. But this is tiring, and tedious, trying to carve out some narrative from his free association — trying to get inside Wayne's head. Doesn't taste good. I got Jobs on the brain, granted, but Wayne's asking us to think different. Quintessentially Southern, he's a lyricist using words in a non-lyrical way, keeping his verse on the same level of importance as the beat and the delivery and the attitude.  

What's tough is that not all the beats knock, yet almost every line is a money shot. It's distracting, overwhelming in a way (say) that a Bun B record never will be. I don't think you're supposed to be able to rap along with Wayne or, like a Magic Eye, key into anything grander. Rather — and this is what Jonah was getting at, and I agree, cue the curtain — the fact is that Everything Is A Mixtape. Rather rather, A Sizable Amount of Our Culture Is Disseminated And/Or Processed Mixtape-Like. And — this is tough — maybe we're not supposed to make it through every track. It's not that Wayne is beyond criticism, just that he's beyond a certain kind of it. The lazy kind. The kind that wants to turn everything anybody ever does into some kind of Statement, to put everything into context. The kind that dares eat a Rapper Eater. Well! This is reality, Greg. May you die slow.  

Nick  

P.S. My favorite track is "Dr. Carter"; the one I skip is "Playing With Fire," or whichever one it is where Wayne compares himself to Martin Luther King.

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