Also eats rappers, and if you don't have any rappers, beats will do
Insofar as major music critics go, few ring my bell with less frequency and fervor than Sasha Frere-Jones, resident pop ambassador to the readership of The New Yorker. I can't pinpoint exactly why; it's not that Mr. Frere-Jones is deficient in any obvious manner, unlike, say Rob Harvilla over at the Village Voice (wonder if Rob caught the chestnut about criticism vs. enthusiasm in Chris Ott's infamous Pazz & Jop piece), or that our tastes are too divergent (some of my favorite writers, like Philip Sherburne or Brandon Stosuy, chiefly proselytize for genres still mostly alien to me). My indifference is probably a result of when he writes about things, which is certainly a function of the editorial demands of writing a column for New Yorker readers that gets published roughly once a month and probably demands a significant amount of lead time. To someone who avidly follows pop music, his work can seem dated even when his sensibilities and observations peg him as ahead of the curve, and when he misses, well, he has to wait another month for his next at-bat.
But, believe it or not, I come not to bury Sasha Frere-Jones, but to praise him; more to the point, I come to praise Lil Wayne. For once, in the pages of The New Yorker, at least, Sasha Frere-Jones meets the zeitgeist at the station. You see, Lil Wayne (born Dwayne Carter) has spent much of 2007 solidifying his status as the self-appointed Greatest Rapper Alive. That would be unremarkable in and of itself (Last Year's Model: T.I.; Year Before That: Young Jeezy), save for the fact that Wayne has primarily done so by delivering, through a highly unlikely method of distribution, what may be the greatest double LP since Sign O' the Times.
That LP is not an official release at all, but a mix tape: a method more often employed for boosting a rapper's hype (and avoiding sample clearance issues) than making a sweeping artistic statement. Yet that's undeniably what Da Drought 3 is, whether it was intended as such or not. Superficially, the record has a tossed off vibe to it that is endemic to most mix tapes; this would be consistent with Weezy's recent claims that he is basically churning out three or four tracks a night. It doesn't take a close listen, however, to determine that this feel is not the product of carelessness. Rather, it's that Wayne makes it look easy, treating the game like a game. His flytrap lilt, one of the most malleable instruments in hip hop, melts around his words, its hard Deep South edges dissolving into an almost Jamaican patois. His verses are effortlessly complex, rewarding close listens with new revelations while retaining their function as the core component of immediately gratifying pop music. Some rappers have to climb up a mountain to get to the top; Lil Wayne seems to have landed at the summit in a spaceship.
When Frere-Jones refers to Wayne's guest verse on DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over" as "thirty seconds of uncontrolled id," he might be onto something greater than he realizes. After all the id is our animal unconscious, the storehouse of our most base desires, most, if not all, of which have to do with acts of consumption. Where other rappers focus on their weight-moving proficiencies or their possessions, Wayne is primarily fixated on ingestion: weed, cough syrup, beats, other rappers, and even stars (the celestial kind). "Feed me feed me feed me," he demands at the beginning of one track, echoing, as Julianne Shepherd points out, the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. He even refers to himself as "The Rapper Eater," evoking either Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children" or Unicron, the planet-eating robot from the animated Transformers movie. Wayne's appetite fixation deviates from the acquisitive nature of other rappers in that, for him, satisfying it implies is more a means than an end; he eats rappers, beats, etc. because his continued forward momentum demands it.
One of the names most connected with Lil Wayne lately is that of fellow hip hop superstar Kanye West; Wayne has claimed West as a sort of spirit guide for his (supposedly) upcoming official album, Tha Carter III, and just yesterday it was announced that a collaboration between the two, suggestively titled "Barry Bonds", would be a late addition to Kanye's new Graduation album. The pairing is fascinating: West literally worked his way to the top, supplying rap high rollers such as Jay-Z with beats while basically having to beg for a shot at the mic, whereas Wayne has been rapping since he got his first contract with Cash Money at age 11. Wayne could rap out of the phone book over the sound of a coffee bean grinder; Kanye has had to overcome his obvious limitations both as a vocalist and a writer with his equally obvious talents as a beatsmith. What both artists have in common is that they share the same aspirations to pop success - Kanye, in part because he can never be the Greatest Rapper Alive but could well be the next King of Pop, and Wayne because, well, he's already the Greatest Rapper Alive, and hasn't even released his next actual album.
One more note about Da Drought 3: it's free. In fact, no fewer than three times throughout the course of the tape, Wayne makes a point of saying "I hope you got this for free."
