These trials have little bearing on the direction of his 13 th studio album Funeral, in which he eschews introspection and sets out on a mission to bury other rappers across a digressive 24-song tracklist. “I’m on Cloud 9, nigga, you just on iCloud/I’m a icon, I shine and burn your eyes out,” he raps on “Piano Trap.” Across the hour, Funeral sounds less like last rites for Wayne and more like a resurrection.A creative slump, a year-long stint in jail, the seizures, the bitter, prolonged label battle-the ‘10s were a tough decade for Lil Wayne.
There is decidedly less storytelling on this record than Tha Carter V, but there is still plenty of clever and unpredictable writing. Lyrics about longevity (“I had a Benz when you had a bike”) and his artistic slump (“Safe to say I lost my way but I never lost the lead/Safe to say I lost the brakes but I never lost the speed”) are snuck in behind cartoonishly vivid sequences (“She say I got a vanilla aftertaste/Cut his face, let him use his blood for his aftershave”). Wayne raps with a lightning ferocity that will often conceal his more direct revelations. Wayne mashes through every song with such reckless abandon it’s hard to tell where he draws influence these days.īut it doesn’t take long for a song to get jump-started, and when it does, it’s thrilling to hear him romp about. “Darkside” hedges closer to the sounds of SoundCloud gloomcasters like Trippie Redd, and he stalks through it with whiny tumbling phrases.
“I Don’t Sleep” sounds like something Pi’erre Bourne might produce for Playboi Carti, the fluttering flutes and springy synths suiting Wayne’s half-sung cadences well. The thought experiment “Dreams” is reminiscent of the best of Auto-Tune Wayne.
Like most Wayne albums, it is longer than it needs to be and thus prone to dry spells.įor years, it has been easy to find trace amounts of Lil Wayne’s style from pop-rap’s center to well out along the weirder edges of the rap internet. Wayne, The-Dream, and Mike WiLL Made-It should be an ideal trio, but “Sights and Silencers” is an inert ballad with an ill-defined concept. On “Trust Nobody,” which leans into a flatlining Adam Levine hook about not even being able to trust oneself, Wayne sounds both bored and boring. The songs where he stops to catch his breath and gather his thoughts tend to venture toward the vaguely introspective, considering isolation, distrust, and love, and they produce most of the album’s sleepier moments. There is a breakneck speed to many of these verses, as if Wayne is so anxious to keep rapping that he can’t wait to get into the next one. Just take a look at this perfectly absurd sequence from the opener: “Drive-bys in a Winnebago/Snipers never hit a baby, crib, or cradle/Sit tomatoes on your head and split tomatoes/From a hundred feet away, now it’s a halo.” Listening to Wayne on Funeral is a bit like watching a skateboard trick compilation: He wipes out a few times but it’s always in service of some epic stunt and when he does land one, it can be awe-inspiring. His “Ball Hard” verse is a free-associative word game, bouncing from one character to the next until they begin to blur together. On the Mannie Fresh-produced “Mahogany,” which warps lyric fragments from Eryn Allen Kane’s “ Bass Song” into jazz scatting, Wayne bends in and out of shape around her interjections. He’s still a volume shooter, but like Rockets guard James Harden (who gets a song named after him here), his low-percentage play is offset by his high degree of difficulty, his ability to break the game with crafty maneuvers and extreme skill. Wayne’s down years were largely the product of a diminishing punchline-to-clunker ratio. Which is to say: funneling what is likely countless hours in the booth spitballing and freestyling into something coherent. With his rebound record finally liberated and the pressure alleviated, Funeral gets back to business as usual for Wayne. Wayne has said Carter albums are the only projects that require any specific preparation and focus, and that his other albums and mixtapes are simply born from his marathon recording sessions. Released at the conclusion of legal battles with his surrogate father and lifelong mentor Birdman, the album felt like the beginning of a second (or third) act. Tha Carter V reestablished Lil Wayne as a force, answering many longstanding questions about his viability as an artist.