The title is sadly accurate. Lil Wayne is a full-blown cottage industry now, a one-man corporation that provides succor and service to careers ranging from Nicki Minaj and Drake’s to Gudda Gudda and Lil Chuckee’s. With this many shareholders come obligations, so despite the increasingly obvious and pressing personal needs of Dwayne Carter the man, Lil Wayne Inc. steamrolls forward, impervious to setbacks. When Carter landed in the ICU for six frightening days this month, after seizures that many assumed were related to his ongoing, years-documented problems with codeine addiction, his handlers smoothed things over with the panicked dissembling of hangers-on propping up an ailing dictator. After his release, Wayne gave a thumbs up to TMZ cameras to allay fears, announcing he was “better than good.” He did look good, but he also, tellingly, shrugged and offered this: “My bum-ass album is coming out... March 26? It's 26?...You’re gonna get that shit or you won’t. If not, it’s whatever.”
This spirit of indifference hangs heavy on I Am Not A Human Being II. In his review of 2011’s Tha Carter IV, Ryan Dombal observed that "after an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money,” and two years later, the prognosis has only grown more grim: No song on IIis meaningfully distinguishable from the next. Everything pumps out in an undifferentiated slurry of interchangeable dick jokes, drug references, and lame puns. Tha Carter IV moved nearly a million copies in a single week, and this staggering success may have sealed Wayne’s artistic fate.
All of the quirks and peculiarities that once made Wayne great have hardened, six or seven years later, into nearly unbearable tics. All of his lyrics have devolved into barely rearranged little puzzles of themselves, with countless versions of his "She ride/ Take this dick like ___” formulation, none of them funny or creative: On “IANAHB”, a woman takes it like “advice,” while others ride it like both "go-karts" and "the Kentucky Derby" on "Curtains”. His tweaking of gangsta-rap’s language has never been more perfunctory. He sounds terminally bored, and even the better rap songs on here-- the hits, like the Mike Will Made It-produced, Future-and-Drake-featuring “Bitches Love Me” or the rubbery, Bay Area-influenced clap of “Rich As Fuck”-- work around him, not with him.
The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap. On “Romance”, he sings in his croaky, limber way about his profane version of love while Cool & Dre’s synthesizers smear like bionic fireflies: “She kissed my ankle when I twist my ankle/ She even did anal when she don't do anal.” On the big, clomping pop rock of "Back To You”, his voice is a shpritz of Lil Wayne on the surface of a towering club-pop production, the kind that mashes together the respective sugar highs of Euro club-pop, hair-metal, and synth pop into a glutinous ball (If you’re wondering whose sampled voice that is crooning at the bottom of all that mess, by the way, it’s Jamie Lidell’s.) This might not be the most promising future to ponder for Wayne’s music, but they’re the moments he sounds happiest: as a cog in a much bigger machine than himself, set free from being the all-consuming center for the first time.
