Hating Carter III: Fuck Ya Favorite Critic

It took a while for me to warm up to Lil' Wayne. Those of us born after 1980 but before 1990 knew him as the tiny hypeman for any number of Cash Money classics before the new generation (and late-to-the-party rock critics) knew him as the "greatest rapper alive." Long before the post-Carter II and pre-Carter III mixtape onslaught, it was seeing the "Fireman" music video that sold me on Wayne. The video, like the song itself, is brilliant and incredibly self-aware, guaranteed to hit cinema and lit types in erogenous zones. Tha Carter II as a whole is a hell of an album - the rapper finally coming into his own lyrically, still hungry, with mostly killer production to back him up.

Unfortunately, Wayne's career starts with his later mixtapes in the minds of most. We all know the rest: anticipation/hype build to crazy levels for the followup to an album no one really remembers. The mixtape paradigm dominates 99% of the reviews for the album when it finally comes out. The album is compared exclusively to the mixtapes that preceded it...the artist's decision to release the thing as an album instead of a mixtape clearly has no bearing. Of course, it still ends up being anointed a modern classic.

Tinymixtapes' Ajitpaul Mangat, in one of the few genuinely critical pieces on the album, hits hard on the 'classic' front, correctly identifying first single "Lollipop" as "a sugary artifact of its times." "Lollipop" is notable for its dissimilarity to "Fireman," its Carter II predecessor - "Lollipop" tries real hard to fit in with current pop trends. It's not awful, it's just unspectacular. Fine, say Carter III defenders - "Lollipop" is an aberration. That's where I disagree. With Carter II, even the big single was, all things considered, pretty stunning. The new album is a collection of half-baked experiments, cheap ploys to the current pop market, and the occasional solid track.

Some of the obvious candidates leap to the album's defense in a Blender-led roundtable (recommended reading if you want to follow the rest of this in full).

Nick Sylvester is quick to defend Tha Carter III as brilliantly anti-album and non-"Event" - in other words, perfect in these Troubled Times for the music industry. The crux of the argument is that Wayne is both hyperworthy of detailed formal analysis and great as background music - Sylvester makes the ambient-period Eno comparison explicit, in fact. The real genius of the album, as Sylvester would have it, lies in its combination of New York lyric-privileging with the South's emphasis on sound...plus its true status as another mixtape rather than an album. Sensing a bit of contradiction there? You're not the only one.

The more standard take (represented here by the Blender crowd, including Robert Christgau): "What’s great about him is that he’s out of control. He overproduces, runs on at the mouth, can’t stop himself." Here's the thing - I'm not sure when "inconsistency" and "greatness" became synonymous. Maybe it's just my rockist (read: reactionary) mindset at work again, but I think a great album needs more than a few good-maybe-great tracks. If the hit/miss ratio Carter III is getting away with is acceptable, we need to do some retroactive re-grading of a lot of the prog critics hated back in the day. Christgau calls excess Wayne's "gift," and Blender senior editor Jonah Weiner wishes the album was more like one of his mixtapes - you know, with a "bit more excess."

Yeah, if only he'd get his Andrew Lloyd Webber on a little more often..."Phone Home" and "Dr. Carter" are classic examples of concept overwhelming execution. End of story. They just don't work. Lyrically uninteresting, horrible production, not at all "pleasant" in the sense Sylvester argues. "Mrs. Officer," "Tie My Hands" - boring. Sure, they all have the occasional blog-friendly one-liner, but do they have any other evidence of the talent we all recognize in this guy by now? What exactly is anyone liking about this record?

Clearly I'm not accepting either of the positive positions. Incoherent-in-its-coherence or coherent-in-its-incoherence, shouldn't there be some fucking signs? It's possible that I've just missed the memo on the revised criteria for music criticism. Let me know so I can start that new blog - you know, the one where I post nonsequitors hourly, widely interpreted by the masses as stunningly articulate praise of the new Lil' Wayne album. Called Geese Erection, of course.