I can’t tell if there’s any real reason to review, or even talk about, Rebirth. It’s not so much an album as it is a long joke with no punchline, an exercise for music writers to go on at length about what a good rapper Lil Wayne is and how mediocre and unnecessary and kind of inexplicable his alt-rock record is.
By now, anyone who follows these things already knows this. They know that the album was delayed at least five times over the last year, either by himself or by people at Universal that found it unbearable, that its singles: the nü-metal homage “Prom Queen,” the Green Day-quoting “Hot Revolver” (not included on the album, likely a consequence of its chart underperformance), the baffling “On Fire”: are heavy on slurred auto-tune and shoddy guitar work. It was this basic sound with which the rapper began to experiment on megahit “Lollipop” and one that’s become less and less endearing over the last two years, Swedish group jj’s homage/cover/whatever “Ecstasy” excepted.
Lil Wayne’s rock music sounds like the product of an intense study of Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and anonymous stadium rock singles released between 2000 and 2003 by someone who has, unlike him, never played an instrument, sang, or even listened to music before; it’s big, flat, angst-ridden and sounds nothing at all like any record any major label has released in years.
The real problem with Rebirth is that it’s exhausting. Every song is overlong, is built on heavily-compressed instrumentation that seems designed as much to induce fatigue as to convey ideas, and is defined by poorly played and badly-recorded guitars. There are no payoffs to contrast with or make up for these indulgences, as there were on Tha Carter III or on any of Wayne’s countless mixtapes; just a whole lot of music that merits questions like, “Is there any way this could have been released had Tha Carter III not been the only record in years to go platinum within a week?” and “Did Kid Rock really spend a summer teaching him to play guitar like he may have claimed that he did? If so, who between the two of them comes out of this looking worse?”
Instead of talking at length about the things he’s good at talking about (money, sex, excrement, what a good rapper he is), he plays with genre conventions by writing almost exclusively about girls that hypothetically spurned him. This is most infuriating on “Prom Queen,” a song largely explained by its title, but presented in far stranger ways in “Get A Life,” where he degenerates into spoken rants, R. Kelly-style, over a vaguely ska-like beat, or on “The Price Is Wrong,” a combination of auto-tuned screaming and boneheaded hair metal riffs.
There’s plenty more to talk about, sort of, but the key points have been addressed elsewhere, and in far more detail; this will be the rapper’s last release before he begins a one-year jail sentence, and this is not the actual followup to Tha Carter III, which will be called Tha Carter IV and likely won’t resemble this record in any way. In the meantime, there’s this, this endlessly fascinating but kind of unlistenable mess of a parody of the early 2000s.
