Make It Wayne
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III
For a while, it seemed Lil Wayne might never put out another album—what was the point? After his last LP, 2005’s Tha Carter II, the New Orleans MC struck upon a music-distribution model so radical it made Radiohead look like Thomas Edison shipping wax cylinders by Pony Express. Step 1: Rap about whatever pops into your head, over any beat you please—copyright laws be damned. Step 2: Flood the Internet with material, compiled on mix tapes or leaked a la carte. Step 3: Say yes to anyone who invites you to guest star on a track (anyone, meaning Enrique Iglesias and Gym Class Heroes). Step 4: Repeat at an inhuman clip, not merely keeping pace with the relentless blog cycle—in which MP3s ping from studios to iPods to trash cans in a matter of days—but leaving the blog cycle facedown on the racetrack, turf in its teeth, gasping for air.
The idea of a Lil Wayne album now seems both outdated and unequal to his accomplishments. How can a 70-minute CD be anything but arbitrary and incomplete next to the gigabytes of heat he’s been dropping? Wayne has atomized the definition of a discography, and for him, there’s no going back. By the standards of a guy who declared himself the greatest rapper alive and then—even more audaciously—proved it, Tha Carter III can’t help but be a bit disappointing. By any lesser yardstick, it’s a weird, gripping triumph—and all but a lock for hip-hop album of the year.
When we talk about great rappers, we talk about where they’re from. Biggie is unthinkable without Bed-Stuy. Ask your mom where Tupac laid his head, and chances are good she’ll throw a Westside hand sign. But for Lil Wayne, home doesn’t really exist. He grew up in New Orleans, but that was before Katrina flushed away his schools, his friends and his stomping grounds. Now he splits his time between Miami, Atlanta, his tour bus and—in a claim that only becomes more plausible the more music he releases—Mars. In a genre dominated by area-code-chanting provincialists, he’s a refugee, a nomad, a resident space alien. This is the secret to Wayne’s 21st-century success, the way he went from funny-voiced Dirty South novelty to the virtuoso Jay-Z had anointed “my heir.” Even as he lamented the destruction of his hometown, his style became unfettered. His taste in beats and sounds is omnivorous, his crushed-charcoal rasp equally indebted to crisp East Coast complexity, Southern singsong and his own warped imagination.
On Tha Carter III, his brain operates at Googletyhundred miles an hour, whipping from one bizarre tangent (Dennis Rodman, the Clapper, Beetlejuice) to the next (oral sex, toenail polish, doctors’ inscrutable handwriting) so rapidly that his rhymes practically double as hypertext links. He likes to have fun—he exults in his own abilities like Tiger Woods bouncing a golf ball on his club 100 times for the hell of it. There’s an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom to the album, the rush of rules being ignored. “A Milli” is nothing but punch line after punch line, with no time for a chorus. “Lollipop” is nothing but chorus, sung giddily through a droidish Auto-Tune effect, and the result treads the line between gimmicky and avant-garde. On “Dr. Carter,” Wayne raps as a physician trying to revive wack MCs, a metaphor he extends for three hilarious, goofy verses, and on “Phone Home,” he steals his hook and his timbre from E.T., croaking about eating rappers he bought at the supermarket—he can’t decide whether he wants to save hip-hop or devour it. And on the smoldering “Shoot Me Down,” he announces, “I’m drinking hot tea, bitch.” Any thug can brag about guns and bubbly. How badass is a Celestial Seasonings shout-out?
That’s his coup: Wayne is a mutant gangsta, messing with what the word means and proving better than anyone since Biggie that the role can reveal more about the soul than most practitioners let on. Where Jay-Z and 50 Cent tout their ruthless efficiency and their focus, he embraces chaos, slapstick, intoxication and uncertainty. For Wayne, a gangsta is an id-unleashing beast. His voice ripples with cracks and growls and other disruptions, as though it’s bucking under his control, and he lets his mind travel places both sillier and darker than gangstas usually tread. On “Playin’ With Fire,” addressing his mother, he sobbingly recounts an adolescent Oedipal showdown: “Remember when your pussy second husband tried to beat ya?/Remember when I went into the kitchen, got the cleaver?/He ain’t give a fuck, I ain’t give a fuck neither.” Even without a blood-spattering climax, it’s harrowing—scarier than all the gunshots and death threats in the world.
DOWNLOAD "A Milli," "Let the Beat Build," "Mr. Carter"
