Follow him on Twitter.It sounds crazy, but this year is set to release his seventh studio album in 2012. It’s heartwarming in ways a Lil Wayne album has never been before, but it’s also boring in ways you never thought a Lil Wayne album could be.Īl Shipley is a writer based in Baltimore. Now that his musical family has collapsed, we hear Wayne with his actual family more than ever before. In addition to the spoken appearances from Wayne’s mother, his daughter Reginae Carter sings on “Famous,” and the mother one of Wayne’s other children, R&B star Nivea, is on “Dope New Gospel.” For years Lil Wayne swore allegiance to Cash Money for life and called Birdman his father.
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Whether or not it is any kind of goodbye or last hurrah, though, the album has a valedictory air to it. But the gap has gradually widened to the point where the guy who made the freewheeling freestyles on Dedication 6 less than a year ago really is distinctly different from the tired, stressed out superstar on “Mess” and “Problems.” 2011’s Tha Carter IV had a sour, downbeat undercurrent to it too, but Tha Carter V is 27 minutes longer, and all 27 of them are painfully earnest.Īt one point, Lil Wayne said Tha Carter V would be his final album, but after disputes with Cash Money kept the album shelved for years, it started to sound more like he wanted to use the album to restart his career with a different label.
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When Lil Wayne began building the legend of “Mixtape Weezy” in the mid-2000s, there wasn’t actually that much difference between the goblin that devoured other artist’s beats for sport and the ascendant pop star that made platinum albums. And “Let It All Work Out,” where Wayne finally tells the whole truth about a childhood suicide attempt, is a gripping finale. Production from Metro Boomin (“Used 2”) and DJ Mustard (“Open Safe”) keep the album sounding current without taking Wayne out of his comfort zone. Dep’s “Special Delivery” on “Uproar” earlier in the album. Dre’s “Xxplosive” shows up, giving Carter V a better moment of turn-of-the-century nostalgia than the lazy Swizz Beatz jack of G. “Dope” featuring Snoop Dogg bangs hard even before the sample of Dr. Whether you love the song’s final minute hinges on how you feel about Kendrick’s emotional, whimpering flow from “m.A.A.d city,” but most of it is undeniable.įrom “Mona Lisa” forward, Tha Carter V livens up more. But their first collaboration, on the 2014 Mike WiLL Made It single “Buy The World,” was anticlimactic, and “Mona Lisa” is the faceoff fans have hoped for: five furious minutes of rapidfire storytelling bars from two all-time greats. Lamar-who so idolized Lil Wayne that one of his pre-stardom mixtapes, 2009’s C4, consisted mainly of remixes of Carter III songs-has long been one of the best arguments for Wayne’s pervasive influence. So Tha Carter V doesn’t fully come alive until track 8, “Mona Lisa” featuring Kendrick Lamar. Nicki Minaj, who blubbered in April that Migos cruelly removed the portion of her “MotorSport” guest spot that she sang, finally gets to sing to her heart’s content on “Dark Side of the Moon,” which is more tolerable than it seems like it should be but still an odd choice for the first half of the album. The first seven tracks include a tearful two-minute interlude from Wayne’s mother Cita that would’ve held more weight as a more brief excerpt, and dreary mid-tempo tracks featuring Travis Scott and the late XXXTentacion that seem to exist primarily to situate Wayne in the 2018 Soundcloud rap zeitgeist that he influenced but was never a part of.
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You could probably chop the entire opening quarter of Tha Carter V off and improve the album. It’s hard to say that a guy who’s been piling up material for years, who once completely upended notions of how much material a major rap star could release, hasn’t earned the right to make a long album. The idea that the 79-minute rap albums of the CD era were too indulgent is being quickly buried under a digital mountain of overgrown albums that won’t waste any vinyl or plastic, but will waste a lot of your time. At 87 minutes, Tha Carter V is the longest album Lil Wayne has ever released, but it’s still shorter than albums released this year by Migos, Drake, Rae Sremmurd, Lupe Fiasco, and Snoop Dogg.