Right now, most of the Stereogum staff is in Barcelona for the Primavera Sound Festival, so we have missed out on important cultural developments like Lil Wayne releasing an album that everybody hates. For a little while, Wayne has been making big promises about Tha Carter VI, the latest entry in a beloved series of albums that's been going for over two decades. I saw tons of people euphorically dunking on this new record before I heard a note of it, and it truly does look like a dizzy collection of bad ideas.
Lil Wayne belongs on any list of history's greatest, most influential rappers, but he has also had more bad ideas than almost any other rapper. These days, there's apparently nobody willing to tell him that it's not actually cool to heavily interpolate Weezer's "Islands In The Sun" on a song called "Island Holiday." Weezy and Weezer previously worked together on the 2009 song "Can't Stop Partying," and nobody liked that, but the sequel exists now, too. Honestly, Wayne's reimagining of LL Cool J's "Rock The Bells" might be just as objectionable. I'm not mad to hear Wayne evoking NORE's "Banned From TV," however.
Tha Carter VI also features the following collaborators: Bono, Andrea Bocelli, Jelly Roll, Machine Gun Kelly, Wyclef Jean. It's also got plenty of collaborators who make way more sense than than those guys, including BigXThaPlug, 2 Chainz, Big Sean, Wayne's sons Kameron Carter and Lil Novi, and his old comrade Mannie Fresh. And then there's the matter of "Peanuts 2 N Elephant," which has an utterly berserk bouncy-ball beat that was produced by Lil-Manuel Miranda. Look, I have not had a lot of sleep in the past few days, and this is just a lot of information to process. I haven't heard the whole album yet, but a quick sampler is not promising. Perhaps you should just listen below and then tell me how it is.
Tha Carter VI is out now on Young Money/Republic/UMG.
