Monday night, I dreamed that an entire Jeopardy! category was devoted to Lil Wayne. I only got through the first two answers (whose questions were: What is Carter? and Who is Baby?) before my imagination gave up, but holy shit was it amazing to hear Alex Trebek say, "Weezy F. Baby," when he read off the full name of the category. That's an ridiculous notion, I know ("I have no brain, I'm retarded. We are not the same, I'm a Martian."), but after watching Wayne move six figures of Tha Carter III its first week out in ailing '08, I'm thinking anything's possible. Jeopardy! category. Vice presidential nomination (the real dream ticket?). The utterance of the phrase, "Yes, homo." Anything. This is not to express shock over Wayne's success, but awe over his power. Like his friend Robin Thicke, he can reach the sky.
"There's no logical answer," says Universal Motown President Sylvia Rhone on Wayne's ability to fly off shelves. But if we think hard enough, we can take a stab at one. The last album to sell within striking distance of six figures its first week out was Graduation by Kanye West, who, like Wayne, is a rapper with across-the-board appeal. The pop freaks love him, the snobs love him, the hip-hop listeners who probably don't pay much mind to the bigger picture love him. Kanye, after all, is safe. Even his flashes of outrageousness ("Heard they'd do anything for a Klondike / Well, I'd do anything for a blonde dyke," and backstage tantrums, alike) wash right into the middle of the road. At his most cerebral, Kanye's articulate to a fault, and that articulation combined with his soulful, often live, sound makes for an nonthreatening package. Do not be surprised if someday in the future, Kanye's material is considered easy listening.
But Wayne goes hard! And what's more, he goes everywhere. What's thrilling about him is his intellectual unpredictability. He cold gets dumb ("Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly, go hard like geese erection") and then spits associations so complicated, they fold on themselves so much that they almost threaten the time-space continuum ("Fuck we / I’m all about oui like Paris /
Hilton presidential suite already / I’m richer than Nicole / And I’m a Lion like her daddy"). He's like any cash-obsessed rapper flinging-money around, but alternately finds time to chin-stroke and properly observe (with a seeming straight face), "Rather unhuman, I should say," when talking about Al Sharpton's public behavior. He's sometimes so right ("Repetition is the father of learnin'") and sometimes so wrong ("I'm a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed"). You get the feeling that he's in total control as he weaves his complex metaphors ("Don’t you ever fix your lips unless you ‘bout to suck my dick, bitch / Swallow my words, taste my thoughts, and if it’s too nasty, spit it back at me"), but there are also what seem like wild tics, especially when he's at his most potentially offensive (in "Mrs. Officer": "And I beat it like a cop, Rodney King, baby, yeah I beat it like a cop / beat it like a cop, Rodney King, baby, said, beat it like a cop,"; and again in the bonus track "Whip It": "I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave / Yes, I whip it like a slave / Yes, I whip it like a slave / I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave / Yep I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave..."). If Kanye is this one preppy thing to all people, Wayne is as close as it gets to being all things to all people. Cha-ching.
To me, he's primarily a cultural critic flyer than Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He's capable of Godfather IIing one of the best pop songs of last year: his (unofficial) sequel to Beyonce's "Irreplaceable," the Babyface-featuring "Comfortable," is better than the original. And who else has the wit, cultural savvy and diabolical sense of humor to strip the phrase "fuck the police" of all the rage associated with it to create a song about...fucking the police, literally (the aforementioned "Mrs. Officer")? Tha Carter III isn't perfect -- there's some boring-ish money rap set to tinny 808s that sounded rusty even two years ago. And then, to make it worse, there's the contemporary pop equivalent of a pissing contest: an Auto-Tuned duet with T-Pain.
But Wayne's verbal chest-puffing serves to make his frequent bouts of sensitivity so much more poignant. In "Tie My Hands," Wayne raps about there being a silver lining in the dark cloud over New Orleans that was Hurricane Katrina. The final result is his demonstration that a song can be that very silver lining. "Tie" is as gloriously gentle as relief should be. Elsewhere, Wayne often qualifies his sensitivity or eccentricity with, "No homo," which is vaguely offensive to me as a gay man and as a linguistic trend-watcher (enough already, you know?). But whatever, I forgive it. I don't think he's being hateful, and I know that the collective sexuality of straight men is so sensitive that it might need a crutch every so often. If that's what it takes for the testosterone-laden to express vulnerability, so be it. Boys will be boys will be fragile.
Plus, the phrase has practical usage, as in, I love Wayne, no homo. But my penis is about the only thing he doesn't stimulate. And yeah, I know it's trite as a white blogger to be big-upping Wayne. I'm joining a years-long chorus. But I don't give a fuck: I'm happy to be part of the group. I'm happy to be one of a milli. For once, I'm happy to be a cliché. Leave the radical eccentricity to Wayne, you know? He's earned it.
