"The best rapper alive"; aka smoke & mirrors; aka Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III
Written: Jul 28 '08 (Updated Jul 28 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: Some fantastic production, no skits, Wayne genuinely has his moments...
Cons: ... but many genuinely bad moments, guest rappers generally, plenty of duds.
The Bottom Line: Is Lil Wayne more than a flash in the pan? Tha Carter II doesn't answer this conclusively; but you'll either love or hate him, so I'll recommend it... just.
paulyoungotti's Full Review: Tha Carter III [PA] by Lil Wayne
You have to hand it to Lil Wayne.
Tha Carter III is one of the most talked about records of the year. Wayne himself is one of the most fervently discussed rappers around, an MC who has sold records in a time when it’s exceedingly difficult to do so. He’s one of the most visible and popular rappers around, to the extent that 50 Cent’s floundering G-Unit ‘empire’ has him marked down as one of their principal diss targets on their latest album. If all that isn’t enough, take it from Wayne himself that he is the “best rapper alive”. Well, apparently. The question is whether Wayne’s self-publicising is actually based on any type of solid foundation. It won’t be on the basis of his last two solo albums, the two star pair Tha Carter (2004) and Tha Carter II (2005). I suppose the closest I could get to authenticating Wayne’s claim would be his decent mixtape record. With the release of the imaginatively titled 2008 completion leg of the trilogy (actually the rapper’s sixth studio album), comes another shot for the New Orleans representing, Cash Money Millionaire representative, to prove his mettle and win over the skeptics. If you happen to have been living on one of Jupiter’s distant moons over the past 18 months or so, you’ll probably be wondering exactly what the hell Lil Wayne sounds like:
View #I: For his fans, he is an eccentric, instinctive MC whose random streams of consciousness and unorthodox punchlines signal a new shift in how emceeing is being re-defined, all wrapped up in a slick boy-done-good hustler persona.
View #II: For his detractors, apply generic to said hustler persona, swap eccentric and instinctive with rambling and clichéd, and denounce him according to the conventionally purist definitions of a good MC.
Tha Carter III often stops to self-consciously plays with these different interpretations, but one thing I can categorically confirm is that Wayne’s bizarrely pitched, weezy (took me all of 10 minutes of writing to mention that word) and croaky drawl of a voice is INSTANTLY distinctive. Back to his style. Street single A Milli sums it up in 3 minutes and 42 seconds, but I can do it quicker; essentially the guy is a hybrid of Kool Keith, Ghostface Killah and Bay Rapper E-40 (with elements of Ol' Dirty Bastard and Eminem's woeful "Encore" phase thrown in). Wayne chops and changes different elements from these various emcees, and I can foresee people going crazy about these comparisons, because Wayne is fresh and unique, right? Wrong. The Game's "different line" approach towards subject matter (ie. switching randomly and unconnectedly from subject to subject in the space of a couple of bars) may have been patented originally by Lil Wayne, but several of Tha Carter III’s songs feature it and it just doesn't impress me. Maestro’s furiously synthesized strings are put to waste on 3 Peat, because the rapper spits one long extended verse which blurs into one long drone. Back to A Milli, and the beat is totally stripped down with the odd hand clap in the background and a self-explanatory vocal sample ("A Milli, A Milli, A Milli") repeated THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE SONG. A truly bizarre concoction, but it's made tolerable by Wayne espousing that strange type of nonsensical charisma he is renowned for (“I'm a venereal disease, like a menstrual I bleed”). All my back-tracking here plays havoc with what I had stated about Wayne's rhyming... but that's because Tha Carter III is far from conventional. And yur average emcee, Lil Wayne is NOT. Average though, he ultimately IS. As he freely admits (though he isn't admitting shit, this was originally Jay-Z's gimmick) he does not write his rhymes down on paper... and all my confusion regarding Tha Carter III is swept away. This album is simultaneously densely foggy yet spell-bindingly transparent (and that's that’s just a Wayne verse). The effect is akin to a rollercoaster, mixed with a car crash.
And crazily, we've yet to consider the beats. The rapper's cast of big name producers steer a deliberately all-inclusive course between different musical styles, which is intriguingly something I haven’t noticed featured prominently in the reviews I’ve read. These days, rap album single territory is clearly delineated - big Lil John style crunk anthems are the rage - never fear dear reader as these are represented to varying degrees of success here, with Lollipop and Got Money. Sex and cash flow/bling respectively proliferate, as does another current big fad: the vocoder (previously re-introduced by Snoop Dogg). The former song, I can report, is an absolute smash of a single with an infectiously zoned out, hard to place key sample placed firmly in the driving seat... however, the less said about the T-Pain featuring, synthesized mess of the latter track, the better. Next up, we got alternative territory: allegedly driving rock guitars on the not particularly good Shoot Me Down and the over-long Playing With Fire. There's always hardcore, street-tough synthesized thug ish on the terrible Alchemist-produced You Ain’t Got Nothin’. Easy to do, but Wayne raps circles around the ad-infinitum monotone wackness of Fabolous (replete with most irritatingly spelt stage name ever), but it manages to avoid one star distinction by a surprisingly charismatic middle verse from Diplomats member Juelz Santana. In a lonely space of its own, last and definitely least we find La La... a track that has a sound which is the grossly abysmal, rock bottom counterpart to Ice Cube's’s “A Gangster’s Fairytale”. The song stars a bassline comprising nearly entirely of a moronic chanted nursery rhyme vocal sample (“La, La, La” this time!) looped repeatedly once again THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE SONG, while Wayne, Busta Rhymes and Brisco do absolutely nothing with their rhymes to even vaguely redeem David Banner's seriously irritating production. This track's sub-zero mark crystallizes Tha Carter III's fundamental problem: Lil Wayne is maddeningly inconsistent. He is not a good enough rapper to enliven bad production, and when he lets his standards slip he can wreck hot beats. Sounds like a Southern based version of The Game to me.
I DID promise that Tha Carter III is a rollercoaster, though, and I wasn’t lying. No prizes for guessing that its best songs coincide with the rapper sharpening and narrowing his streams of randomness. Wayne offers a nice conceptual twist on the “Best Rapper Alive” gimmick with Dr. Carter, rapping from a doctor’s perspective having to cure three different types of rap related illnesses. Hemmed in, Wayne manages to steer his off the wall rhyming into something resembling coherency and the song is enhanced with what will probably go down in history as Swizz Beats’ only musically rich/vivid/complex backing track EVER: a mutedly jazzy bassline which fluctuates in intensity to dramatic effect. There's also the evocative and poignant Tie My Hands, an impressively mature reflection upon the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina. And Tha Carter III’s first half features outstanding contributions from the likes of Cool & Dre, whose demented whirlpool of ricocheting keys, spooky strings and pounding bass on the cinematic horror-core of Phone Home suits the rapper’s equally manic rhyming, as well as Kanye West (helped along by Deezle) on the DELICIOUSLY funky, horn and vocal sample ridden Let The Beat Build. Despite the now proven to be redundant “best rapper alive” rhetoric and outdated juvenile rap message board slang like “no homo”, Wayne is at his most charismatic on this track, proving he can create songs that I genuinely like listening to. Same goes with West’s other cut: the album’s best chorus (courtesy of Babyface) is found with Comfortable, and the rapper neatly sidesteps any misogynistic traps with a (nearly) endearing sex-ode. The album's best song, though, is Mr. Carter. Producer Infamous puts on a first rate Just Blaze impression, for we have every one of the A-List producer's trademarks present and accounted for; triumphantly swirling strings, a gorgeous soul sample for the hook, heavy guest artillery (a competent guest verse from Jay-Z in his standard sharply witty “I have more money from you” auto-pilot). To his credit, Wayne delivers you-know-what, energetically:
"I been in and out the bank bitch
While ya'll asshole niggas been on the same shit
I flush 'em, and watch 'em go down the drain quick
Two words you never hear "Wayne Quit!"
Cause Wayne win, and they lose
I call 'em April babies, cause they fools
And when they snooze, We up!
Feet up like a, Parap-liguck
Or, paraplegic? I parallel park
In that red and yellow thing, old school Atlanta Hawk"
Perhaps my favourite part of this album comes near to this song’s conclusion. As the song’s anthemic chorus loops the bassline drops and the string section fades… we have a moment’s pause, and then Infamous seamlessly fades in a fully-blown, powerful gospel rendition of the very same chant. Wayne then simply talks the listener through the song to its close, not saying much but... in a difficult to quantify way, this snapshot creates an iconic, engaging moment that could represent a consistently productive style for the rapper. I feel that with this LP, the rapper simply does not capture enough anything like this moment, particularly in its patchy second half.
Tha Carter III doesn’t spring any surprises by exposing “the best rapper alive” farce for what it is. While it is Lil Wayne's best album so far, it is far from a magnum opus. Give Wayne hot production and force him to sharpen his rhymes and he is an above average, listenable artist; but anything else and he becomes a rambling, dime-a-dozen rent-a-quote rapper. Unfortunately, this inconsistency bugs this album like a plague. Random analogy here, but the ex England football (soccer) manager Sven Goran-Eriksson (he’s Swedish incidentally) used to say about the side’s performances: “First half good, second not so much”. Sums up The Carter III for me. But perhaps I am the mug. I wonder if Wayne knows that half his output is smoke and mirrors? Or does he genuinely believe his hype? Either way, my expenditure placed on this album will find its way eventually into his (and the label's) pockets. Never forgot, Weezy is a product of the machine - just cunningly disguised as something else...
3 stars
1. 3 Peat (***)
2. Mr. Carter [feat. Jay-Z] (*****)
3. A Milli (***)
4. Got Money [feat. T-Pain] (*)
5. Comfortable feat. Babyface (****)
6. Dr. Carter (*****)
7. Phone Home (****)
8. Tie My Hands [feat. Robin Thicke] (****)
9. Ms. Officer [feat. Bobby Valentino] (***)
10. Let the Beat Build (****)
11. Shoot Me Down [feat. D. Smith] (**)
12. Lollipop [feat. Static Major] (*** ½)
13. La La [feat. Brisco and Busta Rhymes] (ZERO)
14. Playing with Fire [feat. Betty Wright] (**)
15. You Ain't Got Nuthin' [feat. Fabolous and Juelz Santana] (* ½)
16. Don’t Get It (***)
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