Lil Wayne’s recent Tha Carter III sold a million copies in
its first week. It is the first album to do so since 50 Cent’s
The Massacre way back in 2005, and judging by the present
inclinations of the marketplace, it may well be the last traditionally
released album ever to do so.
Last September, when deposed champion 50 was battling it out with
Kanye for release-week numbers, the dunderheaded G-Unit boss made his
ideas on the matter clear: The rapper who sells the most records is the
best rapper. In 50’s paradigm there could be no artistic or aesthetic
factors to override this granite fact.
At the time, Wayne was well into his three-year-long artistic
ascent, exploding with prismatic grandeur across the most prolific slew
of mixtapes and cameo appearances the Western world has ever seen.
Wayne’s stature in hiphop could not have been higher. But there
remained the question of the monolithic, massively successful, and
artist-defining album. 50, briefly dipping his toes into a public beef
with Lil Wayne, cited this missing component as decisive in the younger
rapper’s quest for hiphop consecration. Where was Wayne’s
Blueprint, his Illmatic, his All Eyez on Me?
Lamentably, Tha Carter III is not that record.
In interviews leading up to the album’s long-delayed and fervently
anticipated release, Wayne seemed conflicted in his intentions and
aspirations, alternately regarding Tha Carter III as the
definitive mountaintop of his career and as just another collection of
his constantly outpouring songs. The album aimed to be both a massive
seller and a staggering artistic achievement. The problem is that, in a
climate in which merit and mainstream success are further apart than
ever, it seems unlikely that such an album can exist at all.
The dramatic furor of many of Wayne’s recent mixtape tracks, as well
as the strongest moments of Tha Carter III, suggest that the
rapper could have made an aggressively triumphant album. However, in
pursuing its bifurcated mission, Tha Carter III ends up clogged
with soggy, zeitgeist-stroking collaborations with T-Pain, Robin
Thicke, and the like. The nonlyricism of the astonishingly vapid radio
single “Lollipop” is diametrically different than the thought-spiraling
greatness of Weezy’s best mixtape material. But without “Lollipop,”
there would be no platinum plaque.
The record does succeed in the continued extolling of Wayne
himself, parading both his advanced-placement strides in lyrical acuity
and his star-making alien eccentricity throughout. More than any of his
contemporaries, Wayne’s power exists more in the realm of character and
stylistic uniqueness than in any Apollonian skills of songcraft or
architectural vision. The record’s best moments are largely its most
id-saturated, like the wilding-out, freestyle-like “A Milli.” Or on the
deft Jay-Z duet “Mr. Carter,” in which Wayne resoundingly outshines the
former god MC with vitriol-packed, well-metered darts (“I got summer
hating on me ’cause I’m hotter than the sun/Got spring hating on me
’cause I ain’t neva sprung/Winter hating on me ’cause I’m colder than
ya’ll/And I will neva I will neva I will neva fall”) as well as utterly
swagger-sold throwoffs (“Flyer than Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,
Beetlejuice”).
Wayne’s is a strange time, defined by both the accelerating pitch of
digital-music consumption and the last gasps of the record industry as
we know it. When record executives as salty as Lyor Cohen now describe
their businesses as “music-related content companies,” it is evident
that for artists at Weezy’s level, the soluble future lies not so much
in the production and distribution of carefully crafted records as in
the development of celebrity, character, and brand identity. For
massive pop stars, the artist-as-brand is continually gaining ground
over more traditional focus on the excitement and event of released
albums.
Wayne has proven an adept navigator of this modern age; his mixtape
campaign dominated not only because of his songs’ quality and inspired
lyricism, but also because of their sheer volume and frequency.
Important, too, was that all this music was being released essentially
for free, more as continual advertising for Wayne’s creative mind than
as any sort of well-honed art objects. But Wayne, like the rest of the
record industry, is still susceptible to romanticism for the forms and
figures of the past—namely, the blockbuster album as
event—even while this sort of nostalgia grows increasingly
irreconcilable with the future. Wayne stands as an ambivalent champion
at these crossroads. He grew in stardom exponentially by embracing the
disposability and cannibalism of modern pop on his mixtapes, but has
now channeled all of his momentum into the failed monument that is
Tha Carter III.
His warpath has earned him the title “Best Rapper Alive,” and now,
by the sales-figure criterion of 50 Cent and many others, he now stands
clearly in that spot, with his first number-one album in Tha Carter
III and his first true radio hit in “Lollipop.” But he has also
presented as his magnum opus a collection that is less consistent in
quality than even some of his mixtape double albums, squarely missing
the target of crowning masterpiece. In trying to dominate the game of
previous generations, Wayne may have missed an opportunity to lead the
way toward a new paradigm of hiphop stardom. 