Two years ago, Lil Wayne released a career-spanning compilation, I Am Music. It seems like an impossible task to summarize three decades of music that dates to his febrile debut as one-half of B.G.z in 1995, spans a record-breaking number of entries on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as dozens of official mixtapes and countless unauthorized leaks, and solidifies him as one of the most prolific and influential acts of his generation. But I Am Music largely skips over his heralded early material – there’s nothing from his first three albums and forget about the Dedication and Drought tapes. He opts for the watery arena-sized chum that has girded his work ever since “Lollipop” launched him to mega-stardom. Say what you want about his pleasing but overripe 2011 five-times platinum smash Tha Carter IV. Few would claim that his Bruno Mars collaboration “Mirror” is an all-time highlight.
I Am Music signified a dissonance that marks Wayne’s catalog after 2008’s eight-times-platinum Tha Carter III. Fans still celebrate him as the punchline-dropping weed head with aqueous cadences who reshaped Aughts hip-hop in his image while personifying Dirty South lyricism at its finest. But he has long since evolved into a pop avatar. The qualities that once made him so familiar yet beloved, from his tangy New Orleans vocal tone to his relentlessly funny rhyme schemes, have been thoroughly absorbed into the genre’s firmament. If Wayne was a conceptual artist, perhaps he could rearrange those attributes into a masterwork less dependent on raw ability. But seems cursed to crank out the same ‘ol rhythm ‘n’ blues, albeit not as vibrantly as in his gloried past.
Online insta-reactions to Tha Carter VI since its debut on streaming services last Friday have been mixed-to-negative, which seems unfair. It’s not as thoroughly desultory as 2020’s Funeral nor as distressing as 2013’s I Am Not a Human Being II, the latter of which was released amid his widely publicized lean addiction and felt like a call for help. Waynee sounds happy, like a former champion boxer joyfully taking swings at a punching bag in his rec room. There’s an appealing playfulness to tracks like “Cotton Candy,” where he bandies around cocaine metaphors alongside 2 Chainz, and “If I Played Guitar,” where he sings over a soupy pop-rock track. The album’s final number, “Written History,” opens with the voice of Muhammad Ali circa “The Rumble in the Jungle,” and Wayne positions himself as a sports legend straining for one last ring. Unwittingly, he raps, “I’m like Brady at 45, nigga,” never mind that Tom Brady’s final season in the NFL didn’t end well.
But athletes’ careers don’t falter because they stop moving; it’s because they don’t move with the same quickness and creativity of their youth. Wayne’s still got the punchlines: “I still eat the rappers I heard, they’re appetizers,” he boasts on “Welcome to Tha Carter.” Perhaps inspired by how his 2018 track “Uproar,” which relies on EZ Elpee’s beat for G. Dep’s 2001 hit “Special Delivery,” became an ESPN broadcast staple, Wayne doubles down on the old-school hip-hop references. He raps over the bass rumble of Rick Rubin’s beat for LL Cool J’s 1985 chestnut “Rock the Bells” for “Bells,” and Swizz Beatz’s keyboard fanfare from N.O.R.E.’s 1998 “Banned from TV” for “Banned from NO.” “I was raised on UGK/When them hoes say ‘Weezy F.,’ Weezy F. say U-C-K, bitch! (Fuck these hoes),” he sings on the otherwise awful “Island Holiday,” itself a tepid interpolation of Weezer’s 2001 anthem “Island in the Sun.” For “Loki’s Theme,” he alludes to an Ice Cube verse from N.W.A’s 1988 single “Gangsta, Gangsta”: “Hold up, right, left, right, left, you’re toothless/Break his nose, right hand full of mucus.” It’s fun to hear him chop up OG arcana while overdosing on basketball and football shout-outs. “Weed smoke got me chokin’ like Reggie Miller, nigga,” he raps on “Hip-Hop.”
The issue with Tha Carter VI isn’t relevance – old-head rap made by 40 and 50-something goats has thrived for years now – but a sense that nothing’s really at stake. That wasn’t the case with 2018’s Tha Carter V, where Wayne sounded visibly moved by the innumerable trials he has endured. When he rapped, “I am not number 1, it’s true/I’m number 9-27-82” on the XXXTENTACION-assisted “Don’t Cry,” he sounded relieved to still be alive, regardless of his position in the genre’s constellation. Here, there’s no overarching purpose other than a desire to still dazzle us like before. At best, that leads to “Cotton Candy,” “Hip-Hop” and, if we’re being charitable, “Written History.” It also results in terrible cuts like “The Days,” where Bono sings over an EDM thump; “Peanuts 2 N Elephant,” where he riffs over a clumsily amateurish beat from Lin-Manuel Miranda that personifies the celebrity BFF phenomenon at its worst; and “Mula Komin’ In,” a duet with his son Lil Novi where he raps “That’s Lil Mula, that’s my son, he my youngest…He’s fuckin’ your daughter, I’m fuckin’ your woman.” And, much like Snoop Dogg’s mediocre Iz It a Crime, Wayne only makes glancing mention of his dalliance with Donald Trump. “I’ma red elephant like Donald Trump, but I still act a donkey like, ‘Ha, what’s up’,” he raps on “Peanuts 2 N Elephant.” Make of that what you will.
“I can’t be nothing, just me…don’t try to make me someone else,” Wayne sings on “Bein’ Myself,” a long-anticipated reunion with one time Cash Money godhead Mannie Fresh. Declining to revisit the vintage bounce of peaks like “Go D.J.” and “Tha Block Is Hot,” Mannie loops a melody from Dionne Warwick’s “(I’m) Just Being Myself,” and Wayne convincingly argues why we should let him do him and stop demanding he evolve into a different type of artist. “Get off my lawn because your lawn chair ain’t a throne yet,” he raps. No one should begrudge Wayne for being contented on Tha Carter VI, secure in his reputation as one of the best to ever do it. But he can’t prevent his audience from opting for the classics instead.
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