All of Wayne’s ideas are old ones, and the rap mainstream has finally internalized all his most way-out impulses. He doesn’t seem to bend reality around himself every time he has a new idea. He doesn’t latch down on words like he’s angry at them. He doesn’t have that sense of deranged purpose anymore. The Wayne of Tha Carter V is not the same Wayne that went on that demonic mid-’00s mixtape run. And most of all, it’s miraculous that Tha Carter V is as good as it is.
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It’s remarkable that Wayne was able to return to this whole world, full of his imitators, without sounding rusty or out-of-step. People thought he’d really be rapping about hoverboards and Breaking Bad or whatever, but Wayne has never stopped recording.) It’s remarkable that the audience for a new Lil Wayne Carter album is still there, that the album is already a certified first-week smash. (Before Tha Carter V came out, there were a lot of jokes about how outdated Wayne’s shelved 2014 album was going to sound. It’s miraculous that Wayne was able to put out a big event album so soon after the legal battle ended, that he had so much music saved up that he was able to put out a vast 90-minute chunk of music without much forewarning. It’s miraculous that Tha Carter V even exists at all, that Wayne was able to disentangle himself from all the legal red tape surrounding him and release an album. With that in mind, everything about Wayne’s big return feels miraculous.
It’s like some asshole DA had issued a court order preventing John McClane from going on asskicking adventures. So Wayne spent years in frustrated stasis, practicing skateboarding tricks and cranking out underwhelming mixtapes. Now he’d learned that his surrogate father was stealing his money, and this father figure was wrangling to prevent him from releasing music, the one thing he seemed to really care about. After the death of his father, Wayne had taken to referring to Birdman, his collaborator and label boss, as his father. What followed was a nasty, bitter protracted legal feud that always threatened to erupt into actual violence.
Wayne initially announced Tha Carter V in 2012. When Travis Scott shows up, it’s like getting a cameo from Jean-Claude Van Damme as his Sudden Death character.īut then there’s the added context of this whole thing. (Meanwhile, the Mack Maine chorus is more like Dennis Franz coming back as his Die Hard 2 character: He’s here, huh? Well, fine, I guess.) When a wild-eyed Kendrick Lamar shows up, it’s like getting a cameo from Keanu Reeves playing his Speed character. The two Mannie Fresh beats are total unalloyed joy they hit like Reginald VelJohnson returning for another Die Hard. The new album exists in conversation with all of Wayne’s past work, and given that Wayne is easily the single most influential rapper of this century, it also exists in conversation with all the music that Wayne has inspired. It’s more of a Liam Neeson Non-Stop “Oh shit, that was pretty good!” situation. It’s better, for instance, than either of the two latter-day 21st-century Die Hard movies. If you think about it like that, Tha Carter V is an unqualified triumph. We know that a new Die Hard is inevitably going to come off as at least a little bit of a Die Hard ripoff. We know that the Die Hard ripoff has become the dominant form of action-movie storytelling.
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We know that we’re receiving a new Die Hard movie in a time when Die Hard ripoffs have reached market saturation. We want to see that old shit-talking persona, a little more seasoned and grizzled, coming to life in front of us again.
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We want maybe a scene or two like the bit in Live Free Or Die Hard where he uses a police car as a projectile to explode a helicopter. Mostly, we just want Willis to give us some echo of that old feeling. And anyway, they don’t make movies like that anymore. Bruce Willis can’t jump off of buildings like that anymore. We can’t expect it to be like the first three. Here’s how I think about it: A new Tha Carter album is like a new Die Hard movie.