The Great Lil Wayne Debate: Is Tha Carter III A Classic?

Dear J-Love and Waynans Brothers,

Thanks for your major pain and not-so-hidden darts. Let's get this party started quickly. This post is brought to you by Kraftwerk:

1. Don't sweat "quintessentially Southern." When I say the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne uses words in a non-lyrical way, I do not mean that's the only way he works them. I certainly don't mean to say I think the man is just scatting up there. To be clear, I love this album. 93 RIFFS or 90 RIFFS, very likely. The guy can rhyme. But I'm bummed by what I fear is some New York Critical Approach valuing only Wayne's East Coast Rapperness: the dense metaphors, the rhyme schemes, the science dropped, while Wayne's non-ECR qualities and non-ECR delivery are glossed over. In this roundtable setting, I am trying to correct that. I apologize if I'm overdoing it. But the NYC approach forsakes one of rap's key traits, which is its orality. The stuff you won't see on elyricsworld.com or Sing365. The NYC approach keeps all the venom in the jar — or worse, considers venomous that which is not East Coast Rapperly. NYC isn't necessarily an academic approach, and doesn't produce lazy scholarship per se, but it's very clinical, a little too Wynton Marsalis for my tastes, and shrives Wayne short.

2. Perhaps because it's easier to write about words, I do think critics tend to wax long on lyrics more than the so-called non-verbal qualities of a rapper's delivery. And all I'm trying to get at, swear to Christ, is why Wayne's rhymes are more fun, more physically pleasing than (but just as science-droppy as) your usual East Coast Rapper's. Wayne pays as much attention to the circumstances of his delivery — laughing at every other joke, garbling his best lines, running out of breath, mispronouncing words for the sake of a rhyme then apologizing for doing so, etc. — as he does to that which he delivers. He physically draws attention to the fact that he is a rapper, rapping. These are not secondary to the content. They are the content themselves. And I find his particular sort of attention to delivery, in service to his persona, to his attitude, to the ease with which he wants his words to hit our ears, very Southern — or at the very least, not exactly on the top of the priority list for the science-dropping East Coast Rapper type. I find many lyric-driven rap artists are difficult to listen to. Either I don't like the way his voice sounds, and I don't like how he articulates, or I don't like the words he uses — too many nouns, maybe, or too many abstractions. Dense metaphor is strictly for-the-mind shit. It's there with Wayne too — there in all the ways people have been pointing out so far — but there's a Macbeth side to him too: Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't. Anyone can understand Wayne, and yet no one can understand Wayne.

3. I really enjoyed Jonah pointing out the rhyme structures Wayne leans on, and picking apart the methods to his madness. (I swear I'm done with the Shakespeare references.) The recreation of Wayne's thought process though, i.e. how Wayne got from "yeast infection" to "geese erection," and how his bridge from one rhyme to the other ("fly, go hard") comprises something particularly unique or praiseworthy in the game... Let's not get carried away. Lil Wayne is a rapper. Rappers rhyme. Rhymes exist only as sound. Occam would have it they start at the next couplet's rhyme, and then they figure out how to get there, all while maintaining some semblance of grammar and syntax so we can understand what they're saying. I don't think this is just Lil Wayne's M.O. It's just what rappers do. Let's not get carried away, because otherwise, we're just rewarding rappers for talking in sentences — we're singing their praises basically for not being Aesop Rock. It's a slippery slope. By that logic, Rick Ross might truly be the biggest boss that you seen thus far.

4. The word "narrative" has come up a few times. Narrative comes from narrare, which is O.G. for to tell a story. "Fly, go hard like geese erection" is not a story. It's barely a sentence. It's brilliant. But it's not a story, and it's barely a sentence, and the next verse (to my ears) is "fashion patrol, police detection/ Eyes stay tight like Chinese connection." But maybe that's not the best part of "Dr. Carter" to bring up if you want to talk about the few and fabulous times Lil Wayne stays on point. As I said last time, this is my favorite rap song on the album, key word being "rap song." There's an overarching theme (Wayne is a doctor who operates on rappers), the theme is roughly but not dogmatically adhered to, and Wayne allows himself plenty flights of fancy and dead-end tangent-chasing. That'd be enough for me. But this is why the song is brilliant. As Josh pointed out, Wayne is a terrible doctor. Each verse, he starts out focused, but as he continues the operation, he becomes distracted by his own tangents, as if catching his own reflection in the stainless steel of his scalpels. His first two patients die. Wayne sends up his own vanity, critiques his own style. As in "Phone Home," he preempts all criticism. He's a doctor. You can't read his writing. What's implicit is that: Sometimes neither can he. Notice that the only patient he saves is Hip-Hop herself. The same thing happens as the first two verses — Wayne loses himself in the tangents — but this time he catches himself and focuses back on the task at hand: "Wait! As I put the light down his throat/ I can only see flow/ His blood starting to flow/ His lungs starting to grow/ This one starting to show/ Strong signs of life/ Where the stitches, here's the knife/ Smack his face, his eyes open/ I reply with a nice welcome back/ Hip-Hop, I saved your life."

5. But most tracks on Tha Carter III aren't "rap songs." They are free-for-alls and freestyles and unstructured and (in a word) mixtape-like. As as I was getting at last time: For me this is an entirely new way of listening to rap music. Wayne's approach is of the times, very honest, oddly humble. Let's go bowling: I hear Music For Airports here more than I do The Blueprint or anything rap canonical. This is wallpaper music in the honorable way Eno meant it: Physically pleasing, non-demanding sounds, yet if you take the time to listen, at any given point you will find depth and meaning and brilliance in spades. It is a pastiche of koans, haikus, and RIFFS, nonlinear and with no main entry point. Just drop in. Bob seemed to be getting at this same point, by negation, when he said Wayne will never make a Late Registration. That album was an event, and so struck me anomalous and anachronistic to begin with. Maybe that was its power. But music doesn't have the Event Power it used to. Dematerializing to the point that it's about to bankrupt the very industry that took it this far, music has become part of the daily fabric, taken for granted like heat in the summer and advertisements on the subway. And yet! There is no reason to mourn. Wayne promises.

I don't wanna be a number either,

Nick

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