This isn’t even Jim Jones rapping over MGMT. Rappers genre-hopping is a bit of a trend recently, but this isn’t Kanye’s soul crooning on “808s & Heartbreak” or Andre 3000 trying to play Prince on “The Love Below.” The confluence of various styles isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, except that here it’s wholly inorganic. It’s a pastiche of various styles mashed together – emo lyrics grafted onto hard rock guitar riffs with ’80s hair metal and bizarre synthesizers thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, it’s also a pretty bad rock record. “Rebirth,” then, is less a ham-fisted crossover ploy to sell records to a different demographic than it is an expression of Wayne’s genuine interest in exploring and consuming different types of music. When “Rebirth” was initially billed as a rock ‘n’ roll album, people were hardly surprised.Īfter all, Wayne has made his name largely through his lack of restraint and disregard for conventional limitations a New Yorker article once referred to one of his verses as “thirty seconds of uncontrolled id,” and that’s a pretty apt description of his oeuvre as a whole. The fact that Wayne did so underscored his transition from an up-and-coming rapper, well-respected in hip-hop circles, to a bona fide pop star.īut no pop star is bulletproof, as Wayne’s official follow up “Rebirth” demonstrates. It’s tough to go platinum in under a week in this day and age, what with the advent of file-sharing, downloading and live streaming. In 2008, rap’s best and biggest star was able to move a million units of his magnum opus “Tha Carter III” in its first week of release. For the past three years Lil Wayne has been hip-hop’s undisputed king.
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