Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/06/08
Label: Universal

Since anointing himself "greatest rapper alive" on his last album proper, "Tha Carter II", three years ago, Dwayne Carter has managed to convince a seemingly vast majority of interested observers that he wasn't joking. And this, really, is the principal achievement of this record: positioning itself at the centre of an almost unprecedented and unsubtly manufactured consensus. It's a feat that you truly have to marvel at, because when you actually listen to this bizarre non-sequitur of an album and attempt to focus on who Lil' Wayne is, what he means, or whether he's actually any good or not, it's impossible to say.

Take "Dr Carter", the album's shining high point, in which our hero plays the role of an ER staffer trying to resuscitate three rappers wheeled in for career-saving surgery. It's a great concept, and Wayne almost sticks to the script - but he can't help meandering off into self-aggrandising brags. He talks of how a rapper has to "stand out, like Andre three-K", but even at his most psychedlically abstruse, the OutKast man remembered that simply being different wasn't enough on its own.

The sleeve mistakenly credits the wrong David Axelrod track as the source of "Dr Carter"'s extensive sample, underlining the slovenliness of approach that has Wayne barking on "A Milli" that "I don't write sh*t 'cos I ain't got time." Presumably a nod to how many mixtapes and guest spots he churns out, it ends up sounding like a lame defence of lyrics which lapse into bouts of utter banality. The best rappers give the impression of being in command of their greatness: with Wayne, you get the feeling he just does so much stuff that some of it ends up being good by accident.

He signs off with the ten-minute "Dontgetit" where shafts of lucidity occasionally penetrate the clouds of stoned incoherence; it boasts a self-serving and disingenuous chorus about his being misunderstood and concludes with a three-minute rant at Al Sharpton which essentially says he's a bad man because he complains about things and has a similar haircut to Don King. If this is the kind of stuff critics believe deserves five star reviews and comparisons to Nas and Biggie, it can only be because nobody is really listening to hip hop anymore.

Nevertheless, getting such a sizable majority to hear to a load of gibberish and, by sheer volume of agreement, bully them into pronouncing it genius is a neat trick. Lil' Wayne may be the quintessential 21st century star - someone whose skill has been to craft a patchwork persona that even he doesn't seem to believe in, yet who manages to project it brightly enough on to sufficient lives for it to gain weight and gather an unstoppable momentum. Respect due, and everything. But the "greatest rapper alive"? Come on.

    by Angus Batey