lil wayne is annoying

ok PROVOCATIVE THREAD TITLE but ill be honest, as much as i want to write some kind of narrative (j0rdan s. has done this iirc) about him falling off as a lyricist his voice just grates on me at this pt like nothing else so i cant get far enough through a verse to listen to the lyrics. i was a big fan, loved carter ii, singles & some mixtape moments thru 'lollipop/a milli' 12", but now i cant even go back to his good stuff -- sqad up tapes, first carter, basically anything from the time he slowed his flow down -- w/out just getting a nails-on-chalkboard feeling from listening to the tone of his voice. its been so omnipresent in rap the last few yrs & i know a lot ppl wrote stuff about how great his 'croak' was or w/e but i think i need some distance before i can even go back to the stuff that was really breaking new ground artistically

and lets be real, what artists that hes influenced is anyone really feeling in 2011? when u look back on wayne's career & impact in the 00s, does it make u excited & thinking about the narrative possibilities of rap or does it just make you ;_;?

100 new answers by EOD

i doubt it

& yes i realize thread title /concept is to some degree a challop

speaking for myself & answering the thread subject, i picked up on wayne circa carter ii, which i liked a lot; LOVED carter iii; went thru the back catalog and appreciated bits & pieces back to '99 era cash money. haven't felt anything he's done in the past ~3 years, though. he doesn't actively annoy me... but he doesn't grab me like he did back in the mid-decade.

I think he's gotten way more annoying as he's started laughing at his own jokes on record more (and as his jokes have gotten less funny).

and lets be real, what artists that hes influenced is anyone really feeling in 2011?

drake!

weird I've always found his voice annoying, very hard for me to get past

and lets be real, what artists that hes influenced is anyone really feeling in 2011?

nicki?

and yeah he's annoying pretty much 100% of the time now, but like with jay i can still enjoy the old stuff pretty easily. tons of artists fall off.

after watching diddy, eminem and wayne on SNL, what I wanna understand is the evolution of the mid-rhyme shaky hand gestures.

like, are they all doing drake impersonations or did I not just notice that every wiggles their hands a lot

sorry, "just not notice that everyone wiggles their hands a lot"

for some reason i can still go back to vol 1 era jay z & shit sounds hard & doesnt give me gremlin vibes the way even classic lil wayne does now

i get what you're saying tho - when an act falls off, and you realise that the things that you're hating now were always latent in them and it ruins everything in retrospect. i feel that way about girls aloud.

i mean what doesnt work about nu-jay-z is just that his persona has become like bono-abrasive but it wasnt always like that ... vol 1 jay-z still sounds 'real' & convincing. with wayne what's worn on me is simply the aesthetic qualities of his voice -- the way he doesnt rein it in at all, just lets it growl away, like an untethered balloon or something, w/ no restraints ('no ceilings' lol). i guess i prefer rappers who set up limitations & try to work w/in them or something. but i now have a pavlovian "ugh" whenever i hear his vocal grain on a record, to the extent that any track w/ that grain is off putting to me

i feel v similarly to deej on this topic. somehow the jokes retroactively degenerate

i still like the old stuff, and that SNL performance (and 6'7) was pretty killin'. i'm a casual fan though, haven't listened to one of his albums more than once since carter 2.

i think somewhere along the line cory gunz was copying wayne and now maybe the reverse is true

i think i also have a personal bias in favor of rappers who leave some kind of unresolved tension between total control & exuberance/energy/interesting weirdnesses/creativity/ ---> basically any kind of energy to balance the kind of dry technique. Wayne of course has 'technique' but he basically just gave up on making it feel like it was in tension w/ his eccentricities & creativity, its like a snapped rubber band or something.

the way he doesnt rein it in at all, just lets it growl away, like an untethered balloon or something, w/ no restraints ('no ceilings' lol)

actually lol'd at this-- for shame!

speaking of tensions i think i also just liked the way carter 1 has him emerging as a creative force but w/in the nolia rap template, still spitting over mannie fresh beats. carter ii has fallen in my esteem to a degree just cuz he seemed to loosen the tether from his roots (no more mannie beats for ex) & its most obvious when you compare 'go dj' (classic obv) w/ 'fireman' (ehhh)

Would Carter II have been better if it had been all or more Mannie though? I'm not necessarily a big fan of "musical progress" but making the same/similar album again and again has limited utility after a while as well. Although I guess it would mitigate the kind of burnout we are talking about here...

after watching diddy, eminem and wayne on SNL, what I wanna understand is the evolution of the mid-rhyme shaky hand gestures.

JAZZ HANDS

I'm still a Wayne enthusiast. Obviously Rebirth was bad, and I Am Not A Human Being was a little uneven and stale, but No Ceilings was some of his best work, and that was released less than a year and a half ago. So it's too soon to write the narrative that he's fallen off. He was just overexposed for a while.

was overexposed? I can be in the car for 30 minutes and have 95% of songs at least feature him. I don't have a problem with this.

i think i also have a personal bias in favor of rappers who leave some kind of unresolved tension between total control & exuberance/energy/interesting weirdnesses/creativity/ ---> basically any kind of energy to balance the kind of dry technique. Wayne of course has 'technique' but he basically just gave up on making it feel like it was in tension w/ his eccentricities & creativity, its like a snapped rubber band or something.

― tuomascratch beat (deej), Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

speaking of tensions i think i also just liked the way carter 1 has him emerging as a creative force but w/in the nolia rap template, still spitting over mannie fresh beats. carter ii has fallen in my esteem to a degree just cuz he seemed to loosen the tether from his roots (no more mannie beats for ex) & its most obvious when you compare 'go dj' (classic obv) w/ 'fireman' (ehhh)

― tuomascratch beat (deej), Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^i think another way of looking at this is it's a pretty classic "1960s/early 70s" career arc of an artist with drug abuse problems. at first the drugs probably enhance their creativity or at least help them break into new territory, then thing get worse and more muddled as time goes on.

see also: gucci

the carter IV might be wayne's "soft parade"

Drugs take that toll.

and lets be real, what artists that hes influenced is anyone really feeling in 2011? when u look back on wayne's career & impact in the 00s, does it make u excited & thinking about the narrative possibilities of rap or does it just make you ;_;?

― tuomascratch beat (deej), Thursday, January 27, 2011 5:59 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Lil B, for one.
I've never been a Wayne enthusiast, but I can't imagine Gucci, Nicki, Wacka, etc. getting big w/o him, which is certainly a direction in rap I prefer to countless JZ acolytes.

I thought No Ceilings was pretty great? No Drought 3, but still lots of fantastic moments.

see also: gucci

― the new mordant & zingy ilxor persona (ilxor), Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:59 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

big time

I thought No Ceilings was pretty great? No Drought 3, but still lots of fantastic moments.

― rihanna rennavated my dick (rennavate), Thursday, January 27, 2011 3:04 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

see i wouldnt know -- couldnt make it thru 2 mins of a song on it w/out being like 'ugh his voice'

i get what you're saying tho - when an act falls off, and you realise that the things that you're hating now were always latent in them and it ruins everything in retrospect. i feel that way about girls aloud.

― lextasy refix (lex pretend), Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:15 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^this is a really good post, though for me it recently happened with black mountain, not girls aloud

this is a good thread

first of all, there needs to be a tom b graemlin that incorporates this phrase

i know a lot ppl wrote stuff about how great his 'croak' was

maybe a cartoon drawing of tom's face & the bubble says "croak-snarl-rasp" with a ® after it

ANYWAY

my problem with wayne's voice is that, while i still don't mind it & sometimes still find it interesting, it's really a far cry from the way his voice sounded when he was younger, from 500 degreez thru carter & sqad up tapes etc -- those voices were genuinely interesting & unique in rap, right now he just sounds like a dude that smokes too much -- i do think that wayne's voice means a lot more to him too than most other rappers, not just cuz it's different but because i can't think of any rapper off the top of my head that has gone thru so many vocal changes as him -- not only is wayne's music inherently demarcated by sound, but it's definitely inherently demarcated by his voice, and i think that's pretty important & interesting -- i guess there are a fair amount of rappers in history whose era of relevance lasts as long as his, but i don't think there's anyone whose era of relevance spans the years of his life -- age 15 to age 28 -- as wayne. there's so much growth that happens in that timeframe, and that's seen not so much in his music (he improved as a rapper obv & that's important, but it's not like his subject matter really changed all that much) as his voice

right now he just sounds like a dude that smokes too much

yeah kind of a marianne faithful thing going on

i get what you're saying tho - when an act falls off, and you realise that the things that you're hating now were always latent in them and it ruins everything in retrospect. i feel that way about girls aloud.

― lextasy refix (lex pretend), Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:15 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^this is a really good post, though for me it recently happened with black mountain, not girls aloud

― smang a goon (get it on) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, January 27, 2011 9:59 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, this is similar to how I felt about metallica for years. but less about latent tendencies with them (thrash stuff really is a different animal) and more about how they fell off to kind of an unbelievable degree. like the "I can't believe I used to like these guys" scene in repo man.

"but i don't think there's anyone whose era of relevance spans the years of his life -- age 15 to age 28 -- as wayne"

To be fair their aren't many music makes of any genre whose era of relevance have spanned from teens/childhood to adulthood.

"yeah kind of a marianne faithful thing going on"

The Lil Wayne Broken English comeback will be a thing to behold.

that said i listened to some sqad up stuff yesterday and was still all "man wayne sounded so dope back then"

my main problem w/ wayne now is not aesthetics but lyrics -- things that ship has already mentioned i.e. laughing at his own jokes & stuff we've talked about before -- pee/poop obsession, the construction of purposefully mispronouncing a word then saying "oops!" and correcting yourself. he just became a much lazier rapper, stopped trying to write vividly and really stopped playing around w/ assonance/syllables -- now everything is "stuck to me like lint on denim" which is a style of rapping that i despise & think is poisonous

xpost to alex in sf

haha yeah i was thinking of that

my main problem w/ wayne now is not aesthetics but lyrics -- things that ship has already mentioned i.e. laughing at his own jokes & stuff we've talked about before -- pee/poop obsession, the construction of purposefully mispronouncing a word then saying "oops!" and correcting yourself. he just became a much lazier rapper, stopped trying to write vividly and really stopped playing around w/ assonance/syllables -- now everything is "stuck to me like lint on denim" which is a style of rapping that i despise & think is poisonous

― kl0pper city in the ghetto (J0rdan S.), Thursday, January 27, 2011 4:14 PM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is otm but its poisoned his work from then for me as well

also deej i think there's an element here for you where not only has wayne's music poisoned his discography for you but also the continued insistence by critics that he's still the "best rapper alive!!"

You'll get nostalgic for his good stuff eventually, I imagine.

im thinking tht might be temporary but its like, part of whats cool w/ sqad up is your like WHERE IS HE TAKING THIS?? and then u find out where & yr like ugh. def a 'journay >>> destination' thing

journey

i guess there are a fair amount of rappers in history whose era of relevance lasts as long as his, but i don't think there's anyone whose era of relevance spans the years of his life -- age 15 to age 28

It really is incredible, especially considering how the most celebrated rappers often arrive fully formed, putting out their best work early then slowly sliding from greatness. Wayne's arch was just the opposite. For so long, he just kept evolving, getting better and better, taking more risks, finding new talents and new lyrical muses that kept his output fresh. I guess no artists can really keep that winning streak going for that long.

i think part of what makes wayne seem partic annoying though is that his influence is EVERYWHERE but also feels, like, wholly negative?

w/ a roach gigz exception

the existential urgency of separating yourself from the herd is more pronounced in wayne than other rappers, especially when he is claiming to be an alien or a monster or something. what's great about the "i'm me" song is that there is all this angry, heartfelt stuff about how far he had to come to be where he is now -- "I'm from the mud / i am a missile like a scud" -- and then he seamlessly segues into that totally disgusting joke about adult undergarments.

the carter IV might be wayne's "soft parade"

― smang a goon (get it on) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, January 27, 2011 3:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol who knows wtf i'm talking abt half the time

Due to Jim Morrison's increasing alcoholism and interest in poetry, guitarist Robby Krieger has a stronger presence on The Soft Parade than on any other Doors album from the Morrison era,

Seems similar to what went on with Tha Carter IV, subbing alcohol for promethazine

yeah Krieger's verse on "6 Foot 7 Foot" was dope

"Pop that pussy for a real nigga
Pull out my black card, that's my lil' nigga
Make a movie with your bitch, Steven Spiel nigga
Smoking on Keysh, Cole, gimme me chills nigga"

jesus god

lol yeah that's in the category of supremely lazy "I'm on One"/"No New Friends"/that one Jeremih song verses, I don't know how dude can think that "laid-back" style comes off well

I like the "what's your real name" bit though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmddPo_c2oE#t=193

it's been so long since a wayne song made me this happy that it almost feels weird

huh i'll have to click that

he's gotten to the point where if i see he's a guest verse i won't even listen to the song

he's had some good ones lately, i really like the rick ross single he's on too

wow, shipley endorsement is no joke

"thug cry" is really good. i was in miami for a few weeks right after mastermind dropped and radio there had already picked it up. it sounded really good on the radio so i'm glad it's trickling out.

Think "Bigger Than Life" on the Rich Gang album of all things may be the dividing line between wack/dope recent Wayne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCm9CXwBTA

thoughts?

like it like i liked IANAHB2

it's ok
i like "Believe Me" w/him and Drake

It's just ok. I like that he's trying, but this one is not up to the level of Believe Me or D'usse.

This beat is crappy

bad song. i just wrote about old wayne tho: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/lil-waynes-tha-carter-ten-years-later

"believe me" is great this isn't that great but his rapping still sounds pretty good

when he really starts to get in a rhythm like on the third verse here you can hear him sounding belabored but it's better than his "i'm the shit like a dog's butthole" shtick of the last 5 years

I really hate "Believe Me," just dreary all-around, bummed too cuz his thought a bunch of his guest verses leading up to it were dope

"D'usse" I'm cool with though, and this one to a lesser degree

i'm maybe the only person who has a soft spot for post-C3/pre-No Ceilings unhinged-autotune Wayne though (relistening to certain songs of the unofficial Hottest Nigga Under the Sun tape recently in particular, which I don't think I heard except in pieces when it initially dropped) and he's clearly not coming back heh

yeah "Believe Me" is so-so by Drake standards and awful by Carter lead single standards, amazed how many people say it's fire. "D'usse" is awesome and i'm so depressed that it's already being treated like the kind of semi-forgotten promo single that gets left off of albums entirely.

Drake's had a handful of new tracks this year where people've been "omg FIRE, he's spittin' man" and I just don't get it. Dude's literally the first consensus rapper of recent years where I don't mess with his music, I thought NWTS might change that cuz I really dug "Hold On" but nope

found this when looking for an article on Weezy's lyrical 'progression' over the years. I knew he was into terrible shit 'puns'/wordplay but seeing it all in one place points out that he, uh, has a problem!

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/a-comprehensive-guide-to-lil-waynes-poop-references

main takeaway from that article is that Miley Cyrus looked better with her old hair

really though Drake's the one who made the song that sounds the most like a toilet ("Make Me Proud")

I cannot stand Wayne or any of his derivative flock. "Young Money". What a creative name…

has anyone else noticed this? i swear they modeled it after him. Whack as fuck

http://img2-1.timeinc.net/people/i/2013/news/130513/lil-wayne-300.jpg

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-Trailer-Michaelangelo.jpg

http://images.latinpost.com/data/images/full/8747/michelangelo-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-2014.png?w=600

Wayne has a lot of non-Young Money rappers deriving from different aspects of his style over the years, I would not call him himself derivative. although you said "his flock" so ok

One main criticism I have of Wayne since Carter IV or so, maybe a little earlier, is that his wordplay's gotten more obtuse? Possibly a better word for it

I mean something like "if snow fell like hoes fell in love I'd be a snowman" off the last Khaled album is super-wtf and even on "D'usse" with "real niggas don't whine, we'll burn down your vineyard" for example it just doesn't have the cleverness of his best stuff

yeah he definitely hit a point where he kept trying at punchlines but his standards for what constituted a punchline dropped precipitously. the fake deep almost-wordplay like "when a wolf cry wolf, you still see that wolf's teeth."

for a song called "Grindin'" the new Wayne/Drake song is pretty limp.

i'd blame Drake but Wayne mixing the Young Thug inflection (master becomes the student) & Migos flow and coming up with BS is p lame

Really feeling a lot of IANAHB2 lately and I thought it sucked when it dropped bar two songs. It's the least fucks given of any Wayne project ever and I respect that in a sense, plus he goes in on a bunch of tracks

I'm in a definite not taking bullshit zone after a mad stressful week lol so maybe that's why

I love how this has become the default Wayne thread.

lol

I also feel shit like "Romance" is way realer than any Drake-fronting sensitive-to-these-hoes bullshit, vulgarity and all

actually Wayne's good at those type of songs in general. "I'm Single," "Throw It in the Bag" remix, probably other shit I'm forgetting

Agreed. I'm Single and Romance are among his best songs.

"Gunwalk" is my stopplayingwithmebadBayAreadrivers song and "Romance" is my super-into this chick who I got one more day with cuz she's moving tomorrow song lol

actually you can sub "Beat the Shit" for "Gunwalk" on the first one heh

went through some Idon'tgetit BS with this chick I was originally feeling closer and closer to last night, chick out put on "Anaconda" and I was gonna go nuts lol, immediately put on a few songs from this album + other shit

wtf he did a collabo with 2 Chainz? lord step away for two minutes

What's wrong w 2 Chainz

I like Chainz, but can't imagine Wayne can hold his own w/ him at this stage is all

which is to say his dadjoek game is weak now

2 Chainz definitely carries it but it's a fun project, "MFN Right" is the shit

MFN Right kinda came out first on that solo Chainz tape

is he still annoying

Yes

Liked his verse on Seeing Green, though.

not easy Seeing Green

Great verse on "Timeless" by Bennie the Butcher