New York Times Reviews the Carter III (sort of)

Note: Now that I've been banned from I am no longer bloggging for HHNLive.com, I'd like to do an experiment and see how many people actually read this God awful, hardly updated blog. After reading the article below from the new Hip-Hop bible, the New York Times, I can't tell if I should buy the new Weezy album or not. Truth be told, I have never listened to a Weezy album, although I believe I bought a promo copy of The Block Is Hot from Downtown Records when it dropped and I have the Carter II and Dediction II on bootleg somewhere.

Nonetheless, Mr. F. Baby is the greatest rapper alive the greatest rapper alive from New Orleans with dreadlocks, and I feel compelled to add to his Soundscan totals, even though the mixtape DJs tell me not to. I just can't quite bring myself to do it. "Lolipop" is terrible (yet, somehow, I know every word to the remix - and I don't listen to urban radio anymore) and "A Milli" is arguably the worst song of all time that everyone loves. I think I might've made that beat and freestyled those lyrics when I was 7. I can't even bring myself to listen to the other songs making their rounds through the internet.

So I ask you, my 2 readers that don't post on this blog (and you guys too), should I buy the album? Please comment.

RAPPER'S ROAD TO POP
BY JOHN PARELES

SOURCE

“Mr. Carter,” a song on Lil Wayne’s long-awaited album “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal), brings together Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., and Jay-Z, born Shawn Carter. Since they share a last name — and no rapper would let the sonic coincidence go unexploited — some kind of identity-defining encounter was probably inevitable.

Jay-Z, 38, has been hip-hop’s top honcho and acclaimed virtuoso for a decade. Lil Wayne, 25, has been calling himself the “best rapper alive” for years. Now Jay-Z endorses and anoints him: “I share mike time with my heir,” he raps. “Young Carter go farther, go further, go harder. Is that not why we came? And if not, then why bother?”

“Tha Carter III” is Lil Wayne’s determined push into pop. Without a crossover, he has already gone as far as he can within hip-hop. He got a recording contract when he was 11, and he’s been making albums since he was a teenager, originally with the New Orleans hip-hop group the Hot Boys, which made gold records. He followed through with his own million-selling solo albums, including “Tha Block Is Hot” in 1999 and “Tha Carter II” in 2005. For hip-hop magazines (and, earlier this year, for Billboard), he’s already a cover story. Now he’s headed for radio.

Songs on “Tha Carter III” use lush, string-laden production by big names like Kanye West and Just Blaze, and they often revolve around full-fledged vocal choruses, sung by guests including T-Pain and Babyface. The album’s first single, “Lollipop,” reached No. 1 despite (or more likely because of) its single-entendre lyrics.

“Lollipop” is an insinuating electronic concoction, ticking and blipping, with Static Major (who died earlier this year) crooning the chorus and Lil Wayne’s brief bits of rapping turned into a melody by computer tuning. One of Lil Wayne’s least original efforts, “Lollipop” is just bait, inviting new listeners to notice one of hip-hop’s most free-form rhymers, with a career to match.

Successor or not, Lil Wayne just doesn’t do things Jay-Z’s way — anything but. Jay-Z presents himself as Mr. Organization, from his designer suits to his calm demeanor to the tracks themselves. His rhymes set a meter and stick with it; he chooses a refrain or a topic and works through its variations. He releases his albums methodically, with careful buildup and follow-through tours, and he doles out guest appearances as sparingly as papal audiences. He and his listeners never forget that he’s thinking strategically.

Not Lil Wayne, who treats hip-hop as equal parts career path and compulsion. Since “Tha Carter,” in 2004 — which was his fourth solo album — he has let loose his inner anarchist. “They don’t make ‘em like me no more/Matter of fact they never made it like me before,” he raps on a new song, “Phone Home.”

With the Hot Boys and on his first solo albums, Lil Wayne rattled off strict-meter, rapid-fire rhymes. But on the “Carter” series his phrasing has grown looser, trickier and funnier: “Wittier than comedy,” he raps in “La La.” “But I ain’t tellin’ jokes” — long pause — “apparently.” He drawls to land behind the beat, then casually tumbles through a rush of syllables to end up just where he planned to be. His voice rises and falls in a sly, scratchy singsong — no wonder he calls himself Weezy — that can sound like a cackly old man or a wisecracking kid. His voice holds unmistakable echoes of New Orleans R&B singing: weathered and frisky, jovial and wary.

“Tha Carter II,” released late in 2005, was largely complete before Hurricane Katrina. He raps about that tragedy in a brooding new song, “Tie My Hands”: “My whole city underwater, some people still floatin’/And they wonder why black people still votin’ .” He adds, “No governor, no help from the mayor/Just a steady-beatin’ heart and a wish and a prayer.”

Between albums Lil Wayne rapped an even more bitter reaction in a song called “Georgia ...Bush,” where he rhymed: “The white people smiling like everything cool/But I know people that died in that pool.” The song came out on “Dedication 2 — Gangsta Grillz,” one of the many albums in Lil Wayne’s shadow career as one of the most prolific and widely bootlegged rappers ever.

Major labels and their stars usually equate success with scarcity: completing no more than one album a year (if that), letting anticipation and hype build toward each rare release. But between the installments of “Tha Carter,” Lil Wayne has been ubiquitous, embracing saturation rather than scarcity.

He showed up as a guest on songs by Usher, Lloyd, Chris Brown and Fat Joe; he had his first collaboration with Jay-Z on “Hello Brooklyn 2.0.” He made an album, “Like Father, Like Son,” with his mentor, Birdman. He toured steadily, filling theaters. (He also racked up arrests on marijuana and gun possession charges, including one after his July 2007 show at the Beacon Theater in New York City. He often raps about smoking dope and swigging cough syrup.)

With and without Lil Wayne’s consent there has been a constant stream of mixtapes and studio outtakes, distributed so widely that fans would sing along with mixtape songs at concerts. (It has taken Neil Young up to four decades to release his archives; Lil Wayne won’t have that time lag.)

Many of the mixtape songs are raps over other people’s hit tracks: samples that would be expensive to use on official albums, where Lil Wayne prefers to use newly made tracks. The mixtapes are inconsistent, of course, and the songs fall back more often on the standard gangsta shtick that filled Lil Wayne’s older albums. But even when he’s just spinning his wheels, Lil Wayne has more good material than his albums will ever hold. A deluxe version of “Tha Carter III” comes with “The Leak,” five leaked songs that were officially released earlier this year as digital downloads.

In interviews, Lil Wayne describes himself as a perfectionist. “Dr. Carter,” a song on the new album, diagnoses problems with current hip-hop: “Lack of concepts, originality, his flow is weak and he’s got no style.” And while Lil Wayne is well aware that just about anything he says into a microphone will be online sooner or later, he has clearly worked to make “Tha Carter III” a statement of its own: one that moves beyond standard hip-hop boasting (though there’s plenty of that) to thoughts that can be introspective or gleefully unhinged.

As Lil Wayne’s reputation has grown between albums, he has upgraded his collaborators; “Tha Carter III” is filled with guests. Its production encompasses both the plush and the minimal. There’s suave R&B in “Comfortable,” which sounds like a love song but bluntly tells a woman not to get too comfortable since she can be replaced, and in “Mrs. Officer,” where he has a tryst with policewoman and asks her for her number and she tells him, “911.” There’s bare-bones hip-hop looping in “A Milli,” which is little more than beat, a bass line and a male voice saying “a milli” as Lil Wayne free-associates about being a millionaire, among many other things.

Kanye West gives him gospelly piano in “Let the Beat Build.” There’s rock in “Playin’ With Fire,” which remakes the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire” as a mixture of come-on and death wish, and in “Shoot Me Down,” where Lil Wayne is holding a gun and staring into a mirror. Nina Simone’s version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” accompanies “Don’tGetIt,” in which he raps, “Excuse my French emotion and my passion/But I wear my heart on my sleeve like it’s the new fashion.”

As he reaches for pop exposure, Lil Wayne is tempering braggadocio with a different kind of audacity: he’s showing himself as more vulnerable than ever.