The primary downside is that there aren’t any good songs. Tha Carter VI, Lil Wayne’s 14th studio album—however, given its title, one of many few meant to be immediately canonized—is a blockbuster by design and by committee: No fewer than 28 producers are credited; Bono sings, Lin-Manuel Miranda produces one tune. In 19 tracks, there are vanishingly few moments that may show that this man, nonetheless solely 42 years outdated, was as soon as the very best rapper on the planet. Songs really feel concurrently tossed off and over-considered; there are maybe two passages throughout C6’s 67 minutes that scan as something apart from the product of a hyper-competent skilled in want of great artistic steerage. It might be a catastrophe if any of it mattered.
The primary three Carter installments, launched between 2004 and 2008, chart Wayne’s rise from “youngest Sizzling Boy” to the artistic and industrial epicenter of hip-hop, his gravity such that one-off experiments would spawn a decade’s price of imitators. The fourth, from 2011, offered phenomenally properly however got here throughout a pointy inventive downturn following his 2010 incarceration; the fifth, which was lastly launched in 2018 after years of litigation and leaks, is jagged and messy, however regularly ingenious and idiosyncratic, a grasp artist bumping up in opposition to trade mechanics and his diminished place in tradition. Carter VI comes with no such problems. It’s frictionless in each sense: launched and not using a hiccup, seemingly written and recorded in a really costly vacuum.
Which brings us to the album’s second elementary downside. On C5, total songs can be constructed round a single vocal thought—for instance, the clipped, see-saw cadence he utilized to the “Particular Supply” flip on “Uproar”—in a means that urged poise, premeditation, management. Right here, almost each verse defaults to the identical dense, superficially advanced fashion: a thick block of syllables reduce into phrases and contours as if it had been a jigsaw puzzle. Writing this manner will be time-intensive, however requires (or a minimum of reveals) little in the way in which of precise inspiration; at a sure level, it’s simply math.
On this means, the helpful referent for late-period Wayne is late-period Eminem. Earlier of their careers, each rappers had been capable of navigate extremely tough technical passages whereas nonetheless speaking character, bend, spontaneity. At the moment each of them, syllable-obsessed rap nerds that they’re, write verses which might be—and it is a description, not an endorsement—hermetic, scrubbed of any imprecision, but additionally most of what made them so inimitable at their respective peaks. At C6’s worst, this dutiful dedication to what’s technically appropriate makes Wayne sound like he’s drowning. On “Flex Up,” his tackle a Lil Child-style rolling monotone is meant to solid him as unflappable, however has the other impact, leaving him trailing behind the beat, unwilling to interrupt rhythm and catch again up. The refrain of “Banned From NO” is a barrage of rhyming phrases (“The cocaine whiter/The rope chain brighter/The choke chain tighter/The close-range sniper/The dope-game lifer…”) delivered with such sleepy obligation as to develop into completely uninteresting.
