The Great Lil Wayne Debate: Is Tha Carter III A Classic?
Intro by Jonah Weiner
Opinion: Nick Sylvester
Opinion: Josh Eells
Opinion: Robert Christgau
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?
Dear Wayne Trust:
Like Josh, I was surprised to see Nick describe Wayne as “quintessentially southern, using lyrics in a non-lyrical way.” I’ve taken a different lesson from him since Carter II. When Wayne raps, on “Dough is What I Got,” that he’s “the only down-south nigga could have been in the Firm or the Commission or a Wu-Tang nigga,” I take it as explicit notice that he cares a hell of a lot more about traditional east-coast rapping values (which basically means rhythmic complexity and metaphorical density, right?) than, you know, Lil Jon or Young Jeezy (whose realer-than-real anti-rhyming myth Nick elegantly traced). Wayne’s got a marvelous voice, and I think a huge part of his rise to greatness involves the way it grew from an adolescent wheedle to its raspy, ravaged current condition. But — and if I’m putting words in your mouth, Nick, and they taste nasty, spit ‘em back at me — that doesn’t mean he values sound over sense, much less regards them as equals. Consonant-obliterating T.I. boils his hot lines down into drawl-drones (see “What You Know”), but Wayne is a guy who stops to laugh at his jokes every other bar! As he says on “Dr. Carter,” he means “every letter in the words in the sentence of my quotes” — and he wants us to catch every last one, even if it means rewinding a whole bunch.
But it’s true: job one for Wayne is not Hov-esque, clear-eyed communication or Nas-esque, urgent dispatches. Bob puts it very nicely: Wayne’s brilliance shines when “he overproduces, runs on at the mouth, can’t stop himself.” One of my favorite rhymes of Wayne’s is from “C.O.L.O.U.R.S.,” on Tha Carter III Sessions mixtape, where he brags, “My body’s unique, like the Sistine Chapel/Fresh! Like six green apples.” This couplet is three things: unabashedly goofy; strikingly formalist as it yanks our attention toward the constructed-ness of the rhyme, the work of rhyming going on; and a fantastic punch line by even the most hardened ‘90s-purist’s standards: A thoroughly unexpected, thoroughly original characterization of “freshness.” Fresh like Certs? Heard that or something like it before. Fresh like your first year at college? Zzz. But fresh like the half-dozen Granny Smiths I got at Fairway last October? Yum!
These sorts of rhyme schemes — “parallel rhymes,” as I’ve seen critics call them — are the gems of Wayne’s recent catalogue: Sistine Chapel/Six green apples. Arrogance is funny/Asparagus is yummy. Lot of weed/Pot of peas. Hockey team/Rocky theme. One of my favorites is from “Dr. Carter”: Yeast infection/Geese erection. It’s something Eminem does (used to do?) astonishingly well, but with him the rhymes come in the service, more or less, of a narrative (mom’s spaghetti/palms are sweaty/calm and ready, from “Lose Yourself”). Wayne, by contrast, is great at putting narrative at the service of his rhymes. He starts with a yeast infection. What rhymes with that? Geese erection. How the hell does he get from yeast infection to geese erection in a bar? Well, what properties do geese erections have? They are hard, and they fly. Voila: “Fly, go hard like geese erection.” A chaotic, twelve-way-train-wreck-of-thought meets rigorous rhyme discipline. (I am happy to mention I got to watch Wayne conceive of and record this rhyme for this feature).
So I half-agree with Josh — the mixtapes are exhausting, but the upshot of that is, they’re almost impossible to exhaust: dense, excessive, unpredictable, as surprising and rich with play on a fifteenth listen as the first. I love Tha Carter III, but am I asking too much if I wish there were a bit more excess to it? Not excess in the sense of skits and irritating “ladies’ jams” featuring Bobby Valentino (it’s got the latter — that’s the one I always skip, “Mrs. Officer”), but excess in the sense of buckets of WTF-ness, rules not just being ignored but rewritten in Martian hieroglyphs — Cf. “I Feel Like Dying,” a daydream/waking nightmare Bob aptly identifies as one of Wayne’s most fascinating songs.
Wayne raps, as I put it in a forthcoming hard-copy Blender magazine review, in hypertext links: I love how he pings from tangent to tangent on Tha Carter III. But I wish he’d get lost in those tangents some more, feel out and expand their contours a bit, the way he does in the “Phone Home” Target rhyme Nick mentioned.
Oh, and my favorite song here, if it wasn’t implicit in post No. 1, is “A Milli.” If we’re going by Bob’s rules, though, “I Feel Like Dying” and Wayne’s hard-knock-youth-reminiscence “La La La” – not to be confused with “La La” here – give it stiff competition.
Like, geese-erection stiff.
Jonah
