Lil Wayne, Tha Carter IV
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
Things Weezy F. Baby has done since releasing Tha Carter III: Guided the career explosions of Drake and Nicki Minaj, making the Young Money stable one of the rap industry’s most successful; released three mixtapes (Dedication 3, No Ceilings and Sorry 4 the Wait); released an EP (I Am Not a Human Being); tried to stop the release of a revelatory documentary featuring him (The Carter); dropped a dozen or so guest verses; recorded a Green Bay Packers version of “Black and Yellow” (“Green and Yellow”); went to jail; got out of jail; kicked his codeine habit; and released maybe one of the most ill-advised crossover albums in recent history (Rebirth).
Did I mention that he went to jail for 8 months?
That’s 20% of the time since the last Carter record dropped, people. I mention all of this to say simply that Wayne does not have an off switch. If you watched The Carter documentary, you know that the dude brings a traveling studio with him, with a microphone that he’ll drop into the middle of his hotel room and just spit if the mood takes him. He tours almost constantly, breaking up shows with press interviews and the occasional trip back to his daughter.
If there’s one thing that Wayne doesn’t seem to have time for, it’s quality control. Amidst all of those releases between Tha Carter III and IV, only No Ceilings really displayed the ingenuity and quality of Wayne’s best work, as the New Orleans rapper demolished tracks from little-knowns like F.L.Y. and Dorrough and maybe even bettered a titan like Jay-Z on a couple Blueprint 3 tracks. Which we’d remember if it wasn’t for trash like the God awful Human Being opener “Gonorrhea” or pretty much everything off of Rebirth. And fresh off Dr. Carter’s prison release comes Tha Carter IV, which has been prefaced by the absolutely classic “Six Foot Seven Foot” and the cringe-worthy acoustic ballad “How to Love.” So where on the Birdman Jr. Official Quality Matrix does Tha Carter IV land?
Well, “Six Foot Seven Foot” is still an instant Lil Wayne classic, and nothing can take that away from it. In fact, many of the tracks in which other people guest (“Six Foot”, “She Will”, “Its Good”) find Wayne reaching the dizzying highs that he’s capable of, whether they be “Six Foot”’s rapid-fire, hilarious but pointed punchlines (“Black and white diamonds/ Fuck segregation”), “She Will”’s haunted, laconic sex flow, or “John”’s absolute, joyous maximalism.
But the rest of it? Well, Wayne has officially reached R. Kelly levels of overly earnest strangeness. “How to Hate” sounds like something Kelly would release if he ever thought sex could be a bad thing, which means that– sapped of that R Kelly devotional to the beauty of love making– it sounds awful. “Blunt Blowin” and “Abortion” are similarly overdone, and they’re practically unlistenable for it. No longer do we have the playful jazz-rap games of “Dr. Carter,” instead its replaced with the unlikeable self-seriousness of “President Carter” (What does “I change the stars on the flag into crosses” even mean?). Bottom line: Wayne no longer seems to be having fun, and by far the most engaging thing about Wayne was the utter joy he seemed to exude at tongue-twisting, brain-fuckering wordplay. To see him still trying to sing about serious topics is… well, it’s disappointing.
Even more disappointing are– surprisingly– the beats. It used to be that, if nothing else, you could depend on a Carter record to be stuffed with hot beats that skipped through as many genres as a Broken Social Scene record. But the chosen niche of Tha Carter IV seems to be cheap synths and mid-tempo snares with your bog standard trunk-rattling bass. It’s shocking not to hear the rolling jazz drums of “Dr. Carter” or the spaceship sex of “Lollipop” or the classic Kanye West major key loveliness of “Let the Beat Build,” and the lack of variety in the beats seems to have reduced Wayne himself to cheap, obvious punchlines and a lot of hashtag rap (“Everybody’s fighting over position/ #MusicalChairs”).
On Tha Carter III, even when Wayne was at his most aimless, there was the glassy-eyed, codeine-soaked focus on some indecipherable point in the distance, the accidental profundity found in a drugged out haze. Even when things got their weirdest, like on “Playing With Fire”’s Martin Luther King Jr. assassination fantasies, there was still a sense of grounding, like even Wayne knew how out there he was going, but he just couldn’t help himself. But since that success, Wayne also seems to have lost his self-awareness instead throwing everything he’s recorded out into the world– he still can’t help himself, just in a way that’s significantly less rewarding. Too often on Tha Carter IV, Wayne sounds like he’s parodying himself; the motions are the same, but the dance looks, unfortunately, different.