Lil Wayne - Rebirth Review

Rebirth sounds like the first album that didn't come easily for Lil Wayne: He started working on it two years ago — an eternity for a guy who tosses off tracks in his hotel room between shows. If you have an Internet connection, you know that it's his rock & roll record — not such a crazy idea for this leather-clad Martian with serious rock-star appeal. The problem is that Wayne has very questionable taste in rock. He splutters and wails over tracks stuffed with aggro stomp and bland riffage; it sounds like he's been holing up with a bunch of Spymob and Incubus records. Wayne growls like an Auto-Tuned Kid Rock on the swaggering "American Star." But the hyperclever Wayne we know is missing in action on the anguished chest-thumper "Runnin'." He stretches his croak past the breaking point on "I'll Die for You," like some 21st-century version of Trans-era Neil Young: a vocally challenged genius stuck in limbo....full text You might think Limp Bizkit's oeuvre and their ghastly fanbase of hooting fratboy morons might act as a dire warning to anyone trying to meld hip-hop and heavy metal, but apparently not. Artistically, at least, rap-metal seems to be pop's own Red Bull Flugtag: the best you can hope for is an inglorious plummet, with a load of berks in big shorts cheering you on, but that doesn't seem to stop people getting involved. Either people view it as a challenge or they've noted that, ever since Walk This Way revived Aerosmith's career and catapulted Run DMC to mainstream stardom, it's carried the promise of untold riches: you might think Limp Bizkit's records are unlovable by anyone who isn't an idiot, but their sales figures suggest there might be a lot of idiots knocking about the place.

And perhaps Wayne Carter can transform rap-metal's image. After all, he's big on confounding expectations. It wasn't just that 2008's Tha Carter III bucked hip-hop's declining commercial fortunes by selling more than a million copies in a week, it's that it did it with a sprawling, strange, wildly inventive and brilliant album: it succeeded by challenging the listener, rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator. That said, the omens for his rock album Rebirth augur ill. It's been endlessly delayed. Collaborations with Lenny Kravitz and Pete Wentz, of trainer-bra pop-punkers Fall Out Boy, were announced, then scrapped....full text It wasn’t just NME who proclaimed Lil Wayne to be the best rapper alive in 2008. Time magazine, Rolling Stone and Kanye West were all schnozzing superlatives up his backside, and it seemed the new crown prince of hip-hop could do no wrong. But sitting atop his career peak, Wayne started to get vertigo.

The recent The Carter documentary shows him at his most out-of-control, knocking back litres of cough syrup for the codeine kick. When he emerged from his stupor, he announced that he was giving up rap to make a guitar album. Which brings us to ‘Rebirth’, a shlock-rock record so absurd it makes Alien Ant Farm seem like a legitimate musical venture....full text