Anticipation is high for his commercial release, but Sorry 4 the Wait might prove a point another, more cynical point I’ve been reluctantly weighing since clean Wayne was released.
Wayne rarely releases weak commercial singles, and his recent run from his forthcoming album, the Carter IV, proves the point: The monsters “6’7”” and “John” are still interminable after half a year, and the more recent “ How to Love” transposes the moment’s current Drake-worshiping emotionalism into Taylor Swift territory (which is, obviously, awesome). So it makes sense that now, after stumbling through a possible addiction, lyrical brilliance, a greatest rapper alive pedestal, and a stint in prison (following a gun charge the NYPD used DNA technology to connect him to, albeit tangentially) on his recent mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait, Lil Wayne sounds gleaming.
Wayne’s obviously the godfather of today’s much-touted “weirdness movement” in rap music, though psychic progeny like Lil B and SpaceGhostPurrp are crafting odder (if not stonier) movements, and Death Grips and B L A C K I E are releasing harder (and much better) rap-metal. The crowd just wanted to hear “Lollipop.” It was awkward, much in the same way Marina Abramovic making eye contact while nude and weeping is awkward - there’s no roadmap for where to go, what to do.
Possibly one of the most accidentally performance-art concerts in rap music ever was his 2008 appearance at Summer Jam, in which Wayne, clearly inebriated on some unidentifiable concoction, brought a previously hyped 40,000 or so crowd to a halt by pounding a poorly-tuned axe with impunity, vaguely crooning syllables into a microphone. He leered like Peter Jackson’s Gollum, and when he started noodling on guitars, the effect was that of someone play-acting in a rock film, waiting for a soloing overdub that never came. His metaphors were creatively unparalleled in rap, his voice a smoked out croak. Remember when Lil Wayne was the weird one? In 2006, when Weezy’s career started picking up its second wind with the release of still-astonishing Dedication 2 mixtape, he was the touchstone for avant-gardism in rap, the purped-out, bloodshot-eyed spitter whose magic in the booth could have been conjured by mysticism as easily as anything else (though you’d probably put some of your money on weed).