![]() ![]() Over the lighters-up pop rock of “Mess,” he sings of his life as “a mess of happiness / Lust, sex, obsession, desire with no love” and then, somewhat sweetly, describes the compromises his wife, his side girls, and his exes all must make to get along. His daughter Reginae Carter provides pillowy vocals for “Famous,” an anthem on which Wayne describes superstar vertigo: “the fan mail and subpoenas, jail cells to arenas.” But he’s most gimlet-eyed about romance. Discomfortingly weepy testimony from Wayne’s mother about the skill and largesse of her son recurs. ![]() ![]() The album depicts his icon status as something fetid, and maybe toxic.Ĭertainly Wayne’s view of love, that thing he’s held up as the ultimate goal of his career, is not pretty. “I’m a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed through the pencil and leak on the sheet of the tablet in my mind,” went the signature line from his signature hit, 2008’s delirious “A Milli.” A drama-packed, years-long hiatus from releasing proper albums has now ended with the release of the legendarily delayed Tha Carter V, an event record with an event sound, as stately and fussed over as the improvisational Wayne ever gets. Wayne is an artist of the grotesque who molds words like loose putty, boasts a voice that evokes the tubercular, and obsesses over that which splatters and drips. That this chosen-one origin story includes a bloody baptism makes a lot of sense. On the closing song of Tha Carter V, he describes finding his mom’s gun, calling his aunt and then hanging up, putting the barrel to his chest, and waking up “with blood all around me.” Then comes the mythologizing, with a nice punch line: God “sold me another life and he made a prophet.” But at age 36, Wayne now wants his listeners to really envision what his childhood suicide attempt-which he only recently said was not an accident-felt like. The fact that Lil Wayne survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 12 is the kind of biographical tidbit that gets subsumed by stardom: It’s often discussed as just another reason why The Best Rapper Alive™ is Not a Human Being™.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |