AND LIL WAYNE IS BACK! …hello? It’s nothing if not a perfect example of the heartless nature of celebrity: all those kids sporting “Free Weezy” shirts seem to have put them away. The releases of Rebirth and I Am Not a Human Being did nothing to help his legacy, but shouldn’t have been anything from which the Martian couldn’t recover. After all, he’s established a career around being bizarre and inscrutable.
Yet, as if fair weather fans had been just waiting to knock over the former leader, the hate has come out in gallons. Post-prison, Carter’s received almost nothing but doubt, with declarations of a fall off being mumbled around Rebirth and shouted following Human. Whatever Weezy could have done to curb this, he didn’t. Knowing him, one expected a mixtape 5 minutes after he was out of prison, but Lil Wayne has remained relatively quiet, with only a remix and a T-Pain feature speaking for him.
Neither of these were particularly impressive, either. In fact, they were relatively bad. For the days upon days he’s rumored to have spent recording, he’s shown little of it. It’s a position Wayne put himself in: you accustom people to dropping songs every other day, disappear for a year, then make a quiet return and you’re going to throw everyone off. So his camp started building hype for “6 Foot 7 Foot,” declared “A Milli on roids.”
Well, it is very similar to “A Milli.” In fact, the beat is similar in all ways but one: it’s incredibly annoying rather than amusing. That’s about as far as the comparison can be drawn; the once absurdly creative, lively Wayne is still in that comatose state. He’s relying on his style, and never ventures outside of it, connecting one thought to another in that way only Lil Wayne can. However, more often than not, he’s not nearly as clever as he’s proven himself capable of. Take, “I beat the beat up, call it self-defense,” (nearly identical to a half dozen of his mixtape rhymes you can pull out of a hat) or, “Niggas think they He-Men/ Pow pow, the end,” or, “bitch, real G’s move in silence like lasagna.” Get it? Not that there aren’t some brilliant Wayne moments: to be fair, he’s more alive here than he has been of late, but is a song with a few great rhymes all we should expect from a man who would call himself King?
