So I got my hands on two 6/10 album drops: Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III and Seeing Sounds from the reunited N.E.R.D., The Neptunes' spin-off/weed-carrying posse from earlier this decade. While the two are quite different in content, they are similar in that they have their highs, lows, and their "what the fuck were they thinking?"s.
I'll start with Tha Carter III. Wayne at this point has established somewhat of a "hate him or love him" presence in the game. Not only has he had the number one song on the charts for about the last month, but he's also featured on damn near every single you can hear on the radio (if you can name me one song that gets spins on hip hop stations that doesn't have Wayne, 'Pain, or Chris Brown on it, I'll give you my next two weeks' paycheck. Seriously). Not only that, this dude has so much love in the streets that he could mic his toilet while taking a shit and put it out as a single. To be honest, there are several points on this album, and throughout his career, where he may as well have done just that.
Despite what I said before, I neither love nor hate Weezy. If anything, I hate these 12-year-olds on their MySpace pages and blogs crowning him as "The Best Rapper Alive". But that hatred will be detailed in another post. While his presence at the top is a sad commentary on the music loosely defined as hip hop, I find his rhymes to be entertaining in the most basic sense. While many rappers portray original thoughts and tell engaging narratives (ideally speaking), the appeal of Weezy F.'s sophomoric similies is that they make you chuckle while wondering "why didn't I think of that?" Let's not forget that because he is selling ringtones, he's getting access to the not-quite-as-shitty producers. Kanye donates four beats to the project: "Comfortable", "Tie My Hands", "Shoot Me Down", and "Let the Beat Build". I naturally had the highest expectations for these four tracks, but, alas, the only one of them that's any good is "Comfortable", which amusingly features Babyface. He is overqualified; this is the hip hop equivalent of Mike Ditka resurrecting his coaching career at the high school J.V. level.
This album starts strong beat-wise with Cool & Dre's "3 Peat", Just Blaze's "Mr. Carter", and Bangladesh's "A Milli". I'm shocked that the star-studded "Got Money" with T-Pain didn't warrant a better beat. The album lags a bit after "Comfortable", as Weezy makes a laughable attempt at genre transcendence by pretending to be E.T. in "Phone Home". It doesn't help that David Banner mails in the beat. The retro-sounding "Dr. Carter" is endearing, but our boy can only somewhat pull it off stylistically. When he tries to get his emo-rap on in "Tie My Hands", it doesn't work; this is the movie equivalent of Will Ferrell taking a role in "The Notebook".
The album somewhat picks up again with the Hot-Boyz-reminiscent "Playin With Fire", the teenage-white-girl-tested "Lollipop", and the Bun B cameo "Good Girl Gone Bad". The second Banner beat on the album, "La La" is funny, provided that it is intended only as a joke (also, sue me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this beat sound an awful lot like that Gucci Mane song from last year?). "Nothin On Me" is the highly anticipated, and even more highly disappointing Fabolous/Juelz co-feature, which shows that the East Coast will continue its A-Rod-in-the-playoffs slump through FY08. The ironic part about "Let the Beat Build" is that I waited the whole song for the beat to build, and it never really did. The main disc ends with "Misunderstood", which would be a decent cut if it wasn't Weezy running his mouth for the last 6 minutes of the song on some Kanye "Last Call" shit. However, I LOLed at his political commentary: "fuck Al Sharpton, and anyone like him". Wow, Weezy really is a transcendent figure in this society.
Your satisfaction with this album will depend largely on your expectation going into the experience. Personally, I wasn't expecting all that much, and came into it with an open mind. As a result, I was mildly entertained. If you've been waiting the past two years for Weezy to cure cancer, as many of these youngsters seem to be, then you will be disappointed. If you hated Wayne to begin with, then you certainly won't make it through this album without jumping out of your 18th story window.
Verdict: Bootleg it.
(I review the N.E.R.D. album in part II, which is the next post)
1 comments:
You know I have had little love for Weezy since the beginning and have only slightly improved my opinion of him since the transcendent simile "All my kicks fly, like Liu Kang." I would never go so far as to say he is about a banana peel away from a compost heap if I didn't think that the both of us were literally better rappers than him. I honestly believe that your shit has reached a level of dope that gives you the right to say such things.
This was a funny duo of posts. I liked it a lot.
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