The first problem is that there aren’t any good songs. Tha Carter VI, Lil Wayne’s 14th studio album—but, given its title, one of the few meant to be instantly canonized—is a blockbuster by design and by committee: No fewer than 28 producers are credited; Bono sings, Lin-Manuel Miranda produces one song. In 19 tracks, there are vanishingly few moments that might prove that this man, still only 42 years old, was once the best rapper on the planet. Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.
The first three Carter installments, released between 2004 and 2008, chart Wayne’s rise from “youngest Hot Boy” to the creative and commercial epicenter of hip-hop, his gravity such that one-off experiments would spawn a decade’s worth of imitators. The fourth, from 2011, sold phenomenally well but came during a sharp artistic downturn following his 2010 incarceration; the fifth, which was finally released in 2018 after years of litigation and leaks, is jagged and messy, but frequently ingenious and idiosyncratic, a master artist bumping up against industry mechanics and his diminished place in culture. Carter VI comes with no such complications. It is frictionless in every sense: released without a hiccup, seemingly written and recorded in a very expensive vacuum.
Which brings us to the album’s second fundamental problem. On C5, entire songs would be built around a single vocal idea—for example, the clipped, see-saw cadence he applied to the “Special Delivery” flip on “Uproar”—in a way that suggested poise, premeditation, control. Here, nearly every verse defaults to the same dense, superficially complex style: a thick block of syllables cut into words and lines as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. Writing this way can be time-intensive, but requires (or at least reveals) little in the way of actual inspiration; at a certain point, it’s just math.
In this way, the useful referent for late-period Wayne is late-period Eminem. Earlier in their careers, both rappers were able to navigate incredibly difficult technical passages while still communicating personality, bend, spontaneity. Today both of them, syllable-obsessed rap nerds that they are, write verses that are—and this is a description, not an endorsement—airtight, scrubbed of any imprecision, but also most of what made them so inimitable at their respective peaks. At C6’s worst, this dutiful commitment to what is technically correct makes Wayne sound like he’s drowning. On “Flex Up,” his take on a Lil Baby-style rolling monotone is intended to cast him as unflappable, but has the opposite effect, leaving him trailing behind the beat, unwilling to break rhythm and catch back up. The chorus of “Banned From NO” is a barrage of rhyming phrases (“The cocaine whiter/The rope chain brighter/The choke chain tighter/The close-range sniper/The dope-game lifer…”) delivered with such sleepy obligation as to become totally uninteresting.
The other parallel to Eminem comes with Wayne’s bizarre fealty to the logic of commercial strategies from a generation ago. These are two artists whose names are more effective hooks for an album release than any pop single they’re likely to make; still, each appears convinced that studio albums must come equipped with an array of by-the-numbers pop singles. And as is the case with Eminem, this illogic is compounded by the fact that their ideas of radio concessions have nothing to do with what currently works in that format. It is all but impossible to imagine a song like “Island Vacation” becoming a crossover hit, and all but impossible to imagine Wayne would make it for any other reason.
Bono. Lin-Manuel. A tortured “Ave Maria” flip with Wyclef Jean and (allegedly) new Andrea Bocelli vocals. An excruciatingly cloying duet with 2 Chainz and a mopey meditation with Jelly Roll and Big Sean. Perhaps most damning is Wayne’s constant insistence that the album we’re listening to is in fact Tha Carter VI, establishing a self-justifying and self-perpetuating sense of importance that, inevitably, nullifies itself and makes the whole endeavor seem vaguely embarrassing.
Not every failure is an extension of this grandiosity; many of the album’s beats are simply too disposable to be the scaffolding of anything good. When an exception comes along, Wayne does rise to the occasion. “Rari,” which is handled jointly by Wheezy and Bobby Raps, is a gummy, playful cut with a thunderous low end; Wayne responds with his best performance on the album, darting through the ends of each measure, marking time by recalling Kobe Bryant’s prom date with Brandy. It’s lean, unfussy, and inspired—and arrives 14 tracks into an LP that starts to feel interminable long before.
