Wayne shall be redeemed

How Lil Wayne finally managed to find redemption with Tha Carter V

In a year of disappointment in hip-hop — a year of overblown let-downs and puffed-up mediocrities, of desperate claims at relevance and inconsequential hot-shot debuts — it is somehow only right that the first great rap album of 2018 is by Lil Wayne.

Who could have expected a comeback at this point for the 36-year-old Louisianaborn rapper who hasn’t put out good music since the first months of the Obama administration? And yet here it is. Here is Tha Carter V, six years in the making and almost as glorious as anything he’s ever released. It is heartening to realize that Lil Wayne never gave up — even if the world long ago gave up on Lil Wayne.

Two revealing Lil Wayne quotes. The first, from a profile in Rolling Stone in 2009, at what was commercially and creatively the apex of his career: “I always believe that to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best. When you throw the trash in the garbage can, it has to be better than anybody else who ever threw trash in the garbage can.” The second from the summer of 2014, when he was at his nadir: “I’m confident about what I do… but I’m still nervous about what people think.”

Two growls of the same hunger. The same ardour and ambition — the ethos of an artist who aspires not to greatness but perfection. The difference? The former are the words of an artist achieving it. The latter are the words of a man who is no longer able.

Does Lil Wayne really care what people think? If he does, this last decade must

have been hard. He was, for a time, the most popular rapper in the world. Tha Carter III was the best-selling album of 2008; it was universally acclaimed, like the run of mixtapes he released in the years leading up to it. But the adulation didn’t last. At the turn of the 2010s, critical sentiment began to sour: his guitar-oriented pop-rock album Rebirth was lambasted as an embarrassment, his transitional records I Am Not a Human Being and Sorry for the Wait dismissed as lacklustre and half-hearted. When the long-delayed Carter IV arrived in late 2011 — after Wayne served a stint at Rikers for possession of an unlicensed firearm — the reception was cool. Wayne, it was felt, had lost his touch. The nine records he put out after were steadily worse.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine why. A feature-length documentary made at the time of Tha Carter III’s release found the rapper stoned daily on codeine, half the time seemingly insensible of where he was or what he was doing. “Purple drank” seemed poised to obliterate his natural gifts.

But there was another issue: Lil Wayne is incapable of adapting to fashion. An original talent rarely is. But as the landscape of rap has changed in the last decade, he has — with increasing recklessness — tried. He was ill at ease with the smooth opulence popularized by Drake and The Weeknd. He was out of step with the dulcet trap crooning of the likes of Fetty Wap. He couldn’t do the triple-time verve of Migos or Desiigner, nor the autotune

blues of Future or Young Thug, nor the poetic gymnastics of Kendrick Lamar. Pick a Wayne mixtape from a year when any of these artists were ubiquitous and he will be right there straining to imitate the vogue. But the thing about vogues is that they vanish. There’s no point in keeping up with them. That is, “A Milli” endures because it was written without any desire to sound relevant. When was the last time you listened to “Trap Queen?”

Of course, one of the interesting things about this album is the length of its production and the extent of its delay — and perhaps it seems less of-the-moment because it wasn’t hastily dashed together. But neither does it sound like the product of 2012, or 2014, or any of the other times when he was reported to have been working on Carter V. The record before us now simply could not have been made at the same

time as 2013’s abysmal I Am Not a Human Being II.

The first thing the Wayneweary will notice is the energy. On early banger “Dedicate,” he sounds invigorated, loosing the freewheeling wordplay on which he built his reputation 20 years ago. His performance wows on a technical level throughout. He holds vocal melodies better than ever: slow jams “What About Me” and the exquisite “Dark Side of the Moon” are highlights. He seems to have found the ear for pop hooks he lost: “Mess” is the catchiest Wayne song since “Lollipop”, and “Famous” has the kind of infectious grandeur of a born chart-topper.

What is amazing about Tha Carter V, given its complicated genesis, is how consistent it sounds. This is Wayne’s most coherent statement since Tha Carter III: these 22 tracks may have been recorded years apart, some as old as 2012 and some as recent as

last week, but they are paced and structured according to an overarching plan. The theme is confessional. He allows himself the freedom for candour and vulnerability; for admitting to things both arrogant and wounded, boastful and despairing. “Why am I hurting extra? / Cause I’m working extra,” he says on the bittersweet “Mess.” “My days is a mess / my nights is a mess / my life is a mess.” It’s part apology, part admission. It’s this tension between nature and the desire to do better that runs throughout the album. They’re the doubts of someone confident who is nevertheless nervous what people think.

If there’s a change on Tha Carter V that accounts for its success compared to other recent Lil Wayne efforts, it’s maybe his inclination to trust himself. To sound not like anyone else but just like Lil Wayne. Sometimes this manifests as a sort of aesthetic nostalgia, as on the ecstatic, circa-2009 zeal of the Swizz Beatz-produced “Uproar,” or the goofy, brazenly old-fashioned fun of “Start This Shit Off Right,” which features ghosts of hip-hop past Mack Maine and Ashanti. More broadly it is embodied in the spirit of the album, on which Lil Wayne seems at last happy to follow his own interests rather than the interests of the radio or the demands of the crowd. When he does seem willing to look forward instead of backward, it’s out of genuine curiosity. He’s interested in the new, but no longer in trends.

He has Kendrick Lamar on “Mona Lisa,” but draws out of him a truly bizarre

verse it’s hard to imagine him delivering in any other context; the result sounds like pure Lil Wayne. He welcomes the well-liked Travis Scott on “Let It Fly,” but for his own verse doesn’t adjust, remaining true to his original style even while collaborating with someone on the popular vanguard. Nowhere is this more fruitful than on the pair of tracks that bookend the album. “I Love You Dwayne” opens the record with the hallmark of every contemporary rap album, the family voicemail. But his mother’s tearful words of encouragement hit so hard so fast it’s as if Wayne invented the trope. And album closer “Let It All Work Out” marries vintage Wayne with a tuneful sample from R&B peer Sampha, over which Wayne opens up about a suicide attempt he’d previously claimed was an accident.

This last song concludes with a conversation between Lil Wayne and God. It doesn’t get much stranger or more audacious, and it takes a singular mind to even muster the nerve for such an attempt. But on an album all about faith in one’s self and serious selfreflection, on which the once self-professed “greatest rapper alive” finds new inspiration and wildly reasserts it, it’s perfect and poetic that Wayne should end by reaching out for the sublime. He coasts for the final 30-second outro on the titular background refrain (“let it all work out / let it all work out”) before finishing on a turn of phrase that sums up not only the album but the last decade of his career: “And it all worked out.” Thank God it did.