Lil Wayne: "Prom Queen" / "Amazing Love" / "Hot Revolver"

A few years ago a good friend of mine announced that he was no longer a fan. “Of what?” we asked. “Of anything,” he replied, and then sold all of his movies, CDs, and books. The money was spent on a pair of functional grey New Balances. This nihilism stunned and saddened many of his friends, particularly those with whom arguments on the nature of art and the auteur were cherished memories. But years later this friend (at least) sorta gets it. It can, after all, be a bit taxing. I find myself sometimes these days edging out of step, yearning to remain up on rap beefs and indie-blog trends but ultimately lacking the passion to do so and hitting shuffle on the iPod again—maybe some Neil Young will come up, maybe I’m getting sick. Maybe Colin will text me if someone drops a good verse.

Still, I have and probably never will set myself completely adrift from the earthly going-on of pop music; it’s too deep within me, like the crash of waves to those raised on the coast. Lil Wayne, however, seems to have done so. These “rock” “songs,” for lack of better terms, are the sort of absolute clusterfucks impossible for any but the most unhinged to imagine. For years he’s rebuked the notion that he listen to or even keeps up on popular hip-hop, because, he would claim, he’s too busy working on his own thing—but then in raps he seemed conversant at least, obsessed at most, with his genre’s gossip and goings-on. There were, likewise, allusions toward this rockist shift, not least of which was the guitar-bandying and apparent Kid Rock fandom. But: “What was the record that you claimed was a huge influence for you growing up, that some people might not expect?” a recent ESPN interviewer asked Wayne, leadingly, and looking to bring up (again) his claim to have loved Nevermind (1991) as a child. Wayne had no idea what to answer: “I dunno, what did I say?” The interviewer told him. “Oh, yeah. That,” Wayne replied, by which “that” he meant “music.” He sounds at last freed from human syntax or relations. He is pure lust, pure anger, without form; he is all void and all substance, void as substance or neither or nether. Before his metaphors oozed with an alien grasp of English syntax and etymology; with these raps/songs/quail calls, whatsoever they might apply as sonically, the very music itself seems like an alien’s grotesque impersonation of human sounds.

He’s really gone fucking insane, guys! “Prom Queen” might be the most immediately egregious, but it’s also probably the “best” (quotes again, sorry), equal parts System of a Down and hypercompressed chug and it also kinda makes sense: it’s about a prom queen, as evidenced by the title, and apparently Lil Wayne has/had a crush on a prom queen. This is straightforward, if awful. Many people have crushes. The triumphant uptempo “Amazing Love” refuses such simple classifications, though, squirrely synth lines and a lyrical slant that seems like it might be about the nature of human sadness were it not delivered in a cascade of autotuned countermelodies, acidically digesting meaning into pitchless vomit. The track deserves merit if for no other reason (which: maybe) than for rendering the autotuner into a device of atonal destruction, which is the exact opposite of the way it was manufactured to be employed. “Hot Revolver,” meanwhile, sounds as if produced by and for the videogame Rock Band. I can’t imagine what anyone involved was thinking, at any point, and so won’t speculate.

Last year when Alan Baban and I were working on our semi-Satanic “Red Album” review we yearned for ways to tie together Weezy and Weezer and their twain ability to turn pop music into a singularly solipsistic experience. It is both sad and great that these “rock” “songs” and the forthcoming Rebirth “rock” “album” seem to be Wayne’s own “Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” a monumental act of artistry and self-indulgence that stands as a sort of inverted monument, like the Phallus of Washington stuffed earthward and fucking itself forever, but, alack, so goes pop music in this millennium, I suppose. This is the sort of musical what-the-fuck too great to be ignored, too awful to be hated, too blinding to be a mistake. My friend forsook art for New Balances and seems, in sum, pretty content with the trade-off. They seem like comfortable shoes. But like Cuomo, Wayne forsook art for himself and seems, skin removed, merely rich with self, lavish, garish, decadent, deplored. I will not define progress. I will not stand in the way of change. I will not stand in the way of change.