June 19, 2008 Hip-hop critics and fans honestly want Lil Wayne to be huge. "Tha Carter III," the rapper's sixth solo album in the past nine years, was released last week after nearly a year's worth of delays, the sort of drawn-out tussling between artist and label that usually helps to throw a bucket of cold water on heated fan anticipation. Instead, the album is likely to be sitting at the top of the Billboard Hot 200 after massive first-week sales; blogs are falling over themselves to offer the most in-depth analysis of what many dubbed a masterpiece just hours after it hit the Internet. And all of this attention is something of a fitting reward for Wayne, having spent a decade-plus as a hip-hop workaholic, a man who is, in his own estimation and increasingly in the minds of thousands of hip-hop fans, "the best rapper alive."Many hip-hop snobs have responded to that ballsy self-assessment with a snort of derision, of disbelief that a kid whose legacy primarily rests on bouncy Southern booty rap would have the gall to prematurely install himself in the pantheon. But what other young rappers could they suggest in his place? As hip-hop sales sink along with the rest of the record industry, rappers of deeply questionable gifts, like Miami hacks Flo Rida and Rick Ross, continue to dominate the charts and the magazine covers. Wayne, who kicks off "Tha Carter III's" "Phone Home" with his oft-repeated claim that he is "a Martian," paints himself as a neon alternative to recent monochrome hip-hop, a budding George Clinton where most rappers are content to be third-rate Eazy E's.
In the context of hip-hop in '08, the acclaim for "Tha Carter III" feels like people are trying to will a new rapping genius into existence. The album has immediately become a flashpoint for lapsed listeners hungry for old-school rhyme skills, for indie hip-hop fans hoping some of the underground's weirdness bubbles to the surface of the mainstream, for rock fans drawn to Wayne's overwrought psychedelic metaphors and for listeners hoping to hear something with more longevity than the next one-hit wonder.
At age 25, Wayne's already a multi-platinum selling artist who was, until recently, both a high school dropout and the president of Cash Money, the record label that all but reared him. He's a fatherless child who grew into a respected M.C. after being mentored by Cash Money's Bryan "Baby" Williams (without a doubt one of the worst rappers in the genre's history). He's a one-time divorcé and a part-time college student currently waiting to see what his future holds thanks to an Arizona drug bust this past January. He's raising a daughter as he fends off homophobes thanks to persistent gossip that he's gay. That may be a richer back story than even the self-mythologizing Kanye West's.
Wayne certainly picked up a healthy bit of his friend and producer Kanye's ambition and self-regard, even if their music offers very different pleasures. In an era when a rapper's success is measured in ephemeral 99-cent downloads and YouTube hits, "Tha Carter III" has been hyped up as a meaty, long-in-the-making album from a talented perfectionist who apparently just couldn't stop fiddling with the songs and the track list until a former colleague leaked it to the Web.
Yet for all his finessing, the available-in-stores "Tha Carter III" is as frustratingly patchy as any overlong, slapdash mainstream hip-hop album from one of Wayne's far less talented peers. Stretches of the most inventive rapping you're likely to hear all year are nearly drowned out by generic R&B choruses and soggy pop-chart copouts. At other times Wayne sounds like he's rapping on autopilot over the best batch of beats he has assembled since the late '90s. "Tha Carter III" doesn't fit together or build momentum, and it will disappoint anyone looking for another auteur of album-length hip-hop.
Sometimes it's jaw-droppingly brilliant, too, and the album's inconsistent quality is probably heightened for many by the fact that Wayne really has matured from a second-string rapper to a frequently stunning one; he has enjoyed one of rap's most unexpected artistic transformations. In 1997, as a live-wire high school freshman during Southern hip-hop's nationwide ascendancy, Wayne's shiv-sharp squeak cut a playful path through the menacing raps of his man-size peers in New Orleans' Cash Money crew. Wayne's first three solo records displayed little of the dense, abstract wordplay that has recently won him acclaim. On the other hand, the Cash Money days were the start of Wayne viewing conspicuous consumption and casual violence through a surrealist lens. At one point the crew bragged about wanting to buy a platinum-plated football field.
Just a few years into the new millennium, however, and Cash Money was passé enough in the trend-hungry world of hip-hop that Wayne's "comeback" with 2004's "Tha Carter" caught many old fans off guard. As his records began to attract notice from people craving mainstream rap that went beyond Souljah Boy-style novelty dance singles, Wayne's claim to be the best rapper currently operating started to spark actual debate. Between "Tha Carter" and 2005's "Tha Carter II," he had definitely lost his musical baby fat, maturing vocally and lyrically at a frightening clip. His voice dropped in tempo to a tense drawl whose edges got especially gnarly when he dipped into a lower register and often wobbled and quavered like he was struggling against drug-induced vertigo.
He'd developed something that's sadly hard to find in hip-hop today, among all the teenage shouters and monotone mumblers trying to sound hard: a voice that's unmistakably his own, one that conveys eeriness and ebullience with equal ease, a sound that fits the most honest fan of narcotics in modern hip-hop. And "Tha Carter II" offered the first concrete evidence of Wayne's increasingly fearsome technique as a writer, a virtuosic broadside aimed at those who'd dismissed him as a has-been or a never-was. If one of your complaints about recent hip-hop was that rappers had abandoned their poetic instincts in the rush to craft the most pop-friendly hook, here was one who dissed fellow rappers as if he were dishing out dada: "Me the disaster/ Pity the fool/ Eat a catastrophe/ Swallow the truth/ Belch reality/ How does it taste/ Pie to your face."
Despite occasionally displaying the kind of social conscience critics love, Wayne's freewheeling wordplay certainly doesn't fit the mold of hip-hop reporting made famous by Chuck D and KRS-One. His inscrutable silliness and self-satire separate him from the likes of Jay-Z, whose sense of humor is always in thrall to his swagger. His singsong phrasing and experiments with tempo and time signatures are drawn from the work of Southern rap pioneers like the Dungeon Family, the only big-selling rappers who may outdo him for cosmic weirdness. Wayne may not be the best rapper alive. But he's certainly one of the most sui generis, especially among those under 30.
This is really pathetic then Shiit Hop is not only dead it's cremated. Lil gayne mediocre,coke slurring lyrics makes my ears bleed whenever I accidently hear his so called music. We need a new genre of music,because This shiit aint rap they are absolutely right. There is a difference between Rap and Shiit Hop! Only to the sheeple he's the greatest rapper SMH
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/review/2008/06/19/lil_wayne/
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