Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
Cash Money/Universal
By Jonathon Valenzuela
Hype is a strange and terrible thing. On one hand it is the motive force of the music industry, making sure the fans know all about upcoming releases and the labels know who the fans are talking about. On the other, it can smash hopes and kill careers in the space of time it takes to listen to an album. Unfortunately, the person on the end of the horns this time is Lil Wayne, who blew minds with his previous effort Tha Carter II and did nothing to stop people from elevating the potential Carter III to album of the year even before it's release. Hype takes another victim.
Tha Carter III is a lacklustre album only because of the hype. At face value there is nothing wrong with it. Lil Wayne's style of rapping is still on point, his just-socked-in-the-chest delivery a good vehicle for his punchline rhyming scheme, his lyrical content focussing primarily on how great he is, the women he sleeps with and the money he gets, which is all well and good considering some of the lines he delivers are packed full of the sort of wit that makes you rewind the songs to double-check you heard correctly (most of them too raw to repeat here).
Unfortunately, when the average song length is over four minutes, a lot of these gems are lost in a sea of averageness and chest-thumping. His choice of producers is fairly solid, with each delivering good if average beats (with the exception of Kanye West, whose efforts come of sounding quite milquetoast when compared to others). His guests are also on point, with T-Pain and Busta Rhymes shining through as the best of the lot, and Jay-Z bringing up the rear with a half-hearted effort. Stand out tracks are ‘Dr Carter', a medical-themed pondering on what it takes to thrive in the game, the lullaby-esque ‘La La', the chopped and screwed minimalism of ‘A Milli', the menacingly melancholic ‘Shoot Me Down' and the epic ‘Got Money'.
What-the-hell-was-he-thinking moments include ‘Phone Home', in which Wayne claims repeatedly that he is a martian, and ‘Mrs. Officer', a laughable story of an imagined tryst with a policewoman with a gratingly annoying vocal hook.
It's not a bad album. Really, it isn't. But it isn't a great album, and that is what the hype promised us. Hopefully, Tha Carter IV will creep in, and Wayne will returning to blowing minds once more.