‘The Price is Wrong’ opens with a bit of nu-metal shittery, which to be fair suits perfectly Wayne’s ridiculous verse about a girl who dumped him in high-school. Rebirth could use many more moments like this. Think of a slightly less charismatic Amanda Blank and you’ll have a pretty good picture of the mystery woman with attitude. “Once you go black, you’ll never go back”, says Carter, “Ah fuck it, give me that damn bucket, when I fall this pussy you’d better not start ducking…grab him by his locks and give us a good box” comes the considerably more interesting (yet uncredited on the review copy of the album) reply. The R&B vocal adds a further level of schmaltz, but things liven up slightly with a female rapper coming in after the second chorus and spitting a riposte to Wayne’s assertion of being a ‘knock out’ in bed. ‘Knock Out’ features the kind of emo guitars which sound like a million records you can’t place, but definitely know exist. Outside of Eminem’s contribution, ‘Drop The World’ is deathly dull, three minutes of plinky synths which achieves depressingly little. When Eminem comes in he switches the tone from grandiose nonsense about smashing the world to a verse more commensurate, with a song featuring two of the most lauded MCs around. ‘Drop The World’, the track featuring Eminem, doesn’t reach those heights, at least not on Wayne’s part. ‘Da Da Da’ is another piece of meandering weirdness, juxtaposing metal riffs and funk which manages to rouse Wayne into actually producing a decent rap, instead of the strangulated warbling which characterises mush of the rest of the record. ‘Ground Zero’ opens with one of the most interesting guitar riffs on the album, and Wayne rises to the challenge nicely, bringing the schizoid weirdness that suits his unusual voice so well, lyrics such as “say my name baby pull my hair, and I’m a fuck you like a bull I swear, I got a lot of love that I could share, I got a lot of drugs that I could share” lend a tasty air of menace to the chorus line of flange-treated “J-J-Jump out the window, l-l-let’s jump off a building baby”. The only problem is, Rebirth provides precious little evidence of why. Instead it contains a side of A4 reminding its target of how awesomely influential Lil Wayne has become, how good Tha Carter III was, and how 2010 will be Lil Wayne’s year. It’s hard not to have the feeling too that Universal don’t have the upmost confidence in this record - the release date has been shifted about a goodly number of times, while the press release offers few specifics about Rebirth, not even trumpeting the collaborations with Eminem or Travis Barker from Blink 182. Cue sharp intake of breath over clenched teeth. So now, Wayne is the kind of megastar who labels give cart blanche to do exactly as they please, safe in the knowledge that whatever the result, it will probably still sell by the truckload. With his last album, Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne rose right to the top of the pile of leading figures in this battle between creativity and profit for hip-hop’s soul. For every Kayne and Jay-Z creating innovative shapes from this new-school template, there has been a 50 Cent or Nelly, making music itself seem like a dubious proposition. Since the time when syrupy R&B became the only term on which the charts would allow rappers entry, there have been as many successes as failures. Such determination to reach the high-life leaves few proponents unaffected though, and Wayne’s broad brushtrokes of vocoders and admiration for crunk flirt dangerously close to the kind of obsolescence which has begun to hang around the neck of hip-hop’s biggest stars of late, ‘Paradice’ being one such instance of Wayne’s tendency to let himself down by slipping into radio-friendly unit shifter mode. Lil Wayne embodies everything that rap has come to see the American dream as, coming from the piss poor background in New Orleans, getting where he is today in spite of it. We are a long way from backpacker rap here. ‘American Star’, the opening track on Rebirth, with its “Born and raised in the USA” refrain, at first calls to mind the stars, stripes and ticker-tape strut of Apollo Creed in Rocky 4.
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