He’s agile, excited, a rapper who still enjoys the art of writing and delivering a good verse. He doesn’t sound weighed down by fatigue or exhaustion. Baby has zero intention to rap for an endless amount of time.
Lil Baby is here, and he’s rapping with the undying fire of an Olympic torch. Wayne could’ve recorded this song a capella, and I would have loved it.īig Sean! Not loving this dragged out flow that he’s using to start. It’s just line after line after line there’s no direction. Wayne is in a zone, “ Turn a nigga noodle to nada.” Hahaha, he’s bleeding bars. “ Your partners are poodles.” Wow, that breast line got a chuckle out of me. I don’t know how I feel about this beat, but it’s being decimated by the one-time rapper eater. Wayne is just rapping like this is a mixtape, and I’m not mad. We are three songs into the album, and there has been no sign of a hook. I love the slowed, chopped-and-screwed switch at the end-a keeper. “ Good times, no hard times.” “ Judge gave me time, I did that time like nap time.” Wayne is a lifeboat floating over every drum kick. The spirit of the greatest speaking through a worn-out voice. Wayne’s voice has been touched by time, the tone is exhausted, but he sounds lively.
Hearing Wayne and Mannie back together in 2020 is bringing some warmth into this cold, cold world. Mannie Fresh produced this record? He doesn’t miss.
#Lil wayne new album funeral professional
As Wayne heads into a new decade-his fourth as a professional rapper-it’s hard to know where his head is at, where he’s coming from, or where he’s going.Wayne’s run-on-sentence flow is exciting. Aside from a few moments, like “Bastard (Satan’s Kid),” which touches on Wayne’s father’s neglectful parenting, Funeral is emotionally adrift.
Lil Wayne’s previous album, Tha Carter V, was also overlong, but it was at least anchored by a gentle familial undercurrent. The simple removal of the album’s eight worst songs would have framed Wayne less as an unruly fire hose and more as a madcap rap virtuoso, which he is. While that version of Wayne tempered his referential, stream-of-consciousness style with masterful pacing and comedic timing, too many songs on Funeral -like “Darkside,” “Wayne’s World,” “Mama Mia,” and the title track-devolve into word vomit, as if he’s trying to spew out entire verses in a single breath. These are the quintessential, delightfully random moments that Wayne fans have lived for since his Drought 3 days. Funeral is pockmarked with duds.įuneral is also studded with classic Wayne-isms-like when he shouts out Sinead O’Connor, casually references the condiment Heinz 57, and cooks up a bit of wordplay inspired by Eric Snow, the former NBA player whose unremarkable career peaked in 2003. There’s “Trust Nobody,” sunk by a banal and out-of-place Adam Levine hook “Get Out Of My Head,” soured by the great rap pedant XXXTentacion “Sights and Silencers,” a surprisingly limp The-Dream ballad that he should have just given to Jeremih and “Dreams,” which sounds like Wayne’s audition for a high school production of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
In truth, it peaks early, on “Mahogany.” Amidst a smoky Eryn Allen Kane sample (produced by Mannie Fresh and Sarcastic Sounds), Wayne harnesses his run-on sentence syndrome by tracing the many associative strands that run away from the word ‘mahogany’: “Mahogany door handle to match the floor panel/ Mahogany sand, mahogany Dior sandal.” The battle for the album’s worst song is much more contentious. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules'įuneral is wildly uneven, a landscape of pronounced highs and lows. It is rife with defects-poor editing, clumsy sequencing, and a pupu platter of room-temperature trap beats-that highlight Wayne’s worst tendencies as much his stylistic flair. Despite an encouraging performance from the Best Rapper Alive emeritus, Funeral represents a failure of album construction. He is, at times, still a wonder-an ageless Swiss army knife who can carve up any beat with any gadget in his toolkit, who deploys angular flows and zany metaphors and executes dicey hairpin vocal turns from mutter to wail. Wayne has good reason to indulge this impulse. This album is the work of latter-day Mixtape Weezy, who is eager to treat songs as exercises, to prioritize spectacle over substance, to showcase his technical daring and singular lyrical imagination. These trials have little bearing on the direction of his 13 th studio album Funeral, in which he eschews introspection and sets out on a mission to bury other rappers across a digressive 24-song tracklist. A creative slump, a year-long stint in jail, the seizures, the bitter, prolonged label battle-the ‘10s were a tough decade for Lil Wayne.