Lil Wayne’s career has been one hell of a rollercoaster ride. From Cash Money little homey to established solo artist to bonafide superstar, he has occupied every step on the ladder. Most frustratingly, he has been stuck in artistic limbo the last half-decade or so due to conflicts with his label and his former mentor – Cash Money and Baby, respectively – and as a result, we haven’t gotten a proper Lil Wayne album since 2011’s Tha Carter IV. Yeah, he dropped I Am Not A Human Being II and Free Wayne in the interim, but those felt more like side projects and holdovers while we waited for the main course, which was the long-overdue Carter V project we were all craving.
In the years since Tha Carter IV, Wayne has still been active, recording and releasing one-offs with other artists like Drake and 2 Chainz (including what I consider the vastly underrated Collegrove), but Carter V has been supposedly finished and promised to the fans for so long that it was starting to look like it might never see the light of day. That’s why when it finally hit The Interwebs a couple weeks ago it ignited the rap world. We were all dying to see if it could live up to the standards set by its predecessors, or even hopefully exceed the somewhat disappointing Carter IV album. Considering how long this thing had been gestating, it felt like he needed to deliver in a big way.
So did he? I would have to say that the answer is an unqualified but messy yes. It definitely deserves its place in the Carter lineage, and most seem to feel it’s better than its immediate predecessor. Consuming this album feels like a treat, and I’m not sure if that’s because it is genuinely great or just because we have been waiting for it for so long. At bare minimum, the album doesn’t disappoint, giving us the dose of Wayne we needed along with some sumptuous musical accompaniment.
On that score, Tha Carter V succeeds in spades. The albums boasts some awesome, eerie, atmospheric musical backing for Wayne’s already musical vocals, effectively plunging you into the world of the self-proclaimed Martian. It’s equal parts woozy head-swirl trap and late 90s Cash Money boom bap. Perhaps the most surprising result is how decent the spacey, syrupy ballads are here. Whereas they mostly fell flat on his soulless Human Being efforts, here they connect on an emotional level. It doesn’t hurt that he has clearly stolen a few pages from Drake’s playbook in his melody writing, which you can hear throughout the album. “What About Me” is the most obvious Drake pastiche, which makes it mostly listenable despite the bitter ex-boyfriend pity party he throws throughout.
As for the rapping, Wayne sounds reinvigorated here, clearly putting more everything – time, effort, charisma – into his performances than we’ve heard in years. He has sounded mostly bored since coming down from the insane heights of 2008, but not here. “Let It Fly” is the obligatory Travis Scott feature – how good a run is that dude on right now that I even think of it that way? – and features a reincarnation of Weezy’s “Truffle Butter” flow in its non-stop, battering ram approach.
“Trying not to get pinched, smoking on a stupid stench
Lookin in the mirror tryna figure where my pupils went
Flashy with a boujee bitch, Trav, that’s my hooligan
Take the T off Tunechi and look at it as the crucifix, bitch”
This is what we have been waiting on. Now art thou Wayne.
“Open Letter” succeeds in a similar vein, giving us the manic, stream-of-consciousness style that endeared him to us in the first place. “Dope N*ggaz” featuring Snoop Dogg does as well, and its interpolation of Dre’s “Xplosive” beat is dope as fuck. On a side note, Snoop is absolutely eternal in this role. His skinny ass will be 80 years old and still slide through with a dope hook or ad lib, still rapping about smoking weed and staying fly. Needless to say, it works here.
Elsewhere, he revels in words for their own sake on “Open Safe,” stacking up back-to-back internal rhymes with little concern for the meaning behind them. But goddamn it sounds good and with his evocative delivery meaning is almost secondary anyway. “Used 2” is as straightforward a rap track as you can expect from Wayne, and a good one at that.
There’s no way to discuss this album without also going into “Mona Lisa,” the collaboration with Kendrick Lamar that tries to be an epic story-telling rap-off between the two heavyweights. And in a certain sense it is, as both MCs rap their asses off, with Kendrick doing the raspy, panicked sounding voice he has used so well over the years. The story itself is an over-the-top tale about Wayne and a gorgeous woman who helps him ensnare unsuspecting men in order to rob them. K Dot plays the mark who loses his shit when he realizes he is being played. It makes for an interesting listen the first, maybe second time, but after that it starts to feel like a reach and ends up being too over the top to leave a lasting impression. (Non-sequitur: Kendrick really is an exceptional rapper. In case anyone was still unclear on that.)
And then there’s “Let It All Work Out.” Wayne has dabbled in confessional, emotional raps in the past, but he fully commits to it here, detailing his own superhero origin story about shooting himself at age twelve. We have heard this tale in bits and pieces throughout the years, but here he finally admits to it being intentional, the result of inner turmoil (“too much was on my conscience to be smart about it”) and the beginning of his rebirth as rap megastar.
“I didn’t die, but as I was dying
God came to my side and we talked about it
He sold me another life and he made a prophet/profit”
It’s compelling and honest, as well as both cynical and optimistic at the same time, and it’s part of the dynamic that keeps us all listening.
Is the album too long? Oh for damn sure. But after being enveloped in Wayne’s world for the better part of 90 minutes, you start to realize that’s kind of the point. It often seems like he has that hyperactive ability to have a million different tabs open in the internet browser of his mind, and immersing yourself in this “mess” feels like a way to genuinely appreciate the haphazard brilliance of Tunechi at his best, in all his hedonistic, absurdist glory. The introspection just takes it over the top and lends gravity to the album’s craziest moments as you feel like even those loony, tossed-off asides are expressive of some portion of his tortured soul. Or, on the other hand, maybe this motherfucker really is this crazy with no method to his madness. After multimillions sold and earned, though, it’s hard to argue that his throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach is without an underlying emotional core that resonates with different generations of hip hop fans, all of whom seem to agree that Weezy still represents must-see TV. So even while a lot of the journey feels like a slog, and the road rambles off in every direction, it’s a worthwhile trip to take for the sake of the company alone. When Wayne is in this kind of form, we can revel in his scattered brilliance even when the quality level is uneven, because he’s such a damn captivating figure. Long live the alien.
