5. Nightmares of the Bottom
6. She Will
7. How to Hate
8. Interlude
9. John
10. Abortion
11. So Special
12. How to Love
13. President Carter
14. It’s Good
15. Outro

Other Records by Lil Wayne Lil Wayne: I Am Not A Human Being Young Money: We Are Young Money Lil Wayne: Rebirth Lil Wayne: No Ceilings Mixtape Lil Wayne and DJ Drama: Dedication 3 Mixtape Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III Mixtape Mixtape Lil Wayne

Tha Carter IV

(Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic; 2011)

By Chris Molnar | 9 September 2011

There’s never been a guest rapper like Lil Wayne. Although he doesn’t boost a cut’s energy like Busta, or slosh it in paint like Nicki, or infuse a certain, necessary levity like Ludacris, what he does better than any other is filter a song through his unique sensibility until it’s unrecognizably anyone else’s out the other end, unexpected metaphors and non-sequiturs each a miniscule prism refracting the Top 40 into something surreal, something existential. And here is Tha Carter IV, which is, more than anything else Wayne’s released, an album-length look at one emcee’s ability to utterly remake the world in his image, to write more arresting and psychologically rich lines in his unhindered, aphoristic cadence, cackling while the vistas crumble and then speaking the fetal civilization back into being. This is Weezy standing over his nascent, Utopian hope like a 5’6” Colossus over Rhodes. Cue rock-hard dick pun.

On the pre-album mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait (2011) we get “all my hoes dirty like welcome mats”: good-time wordplay from Mixtape Wayne. Here, he claims as if he’s an emcee just starting out, “I’m a diamond in the rough like a baby in the trash” (“Megaman”). This is more than a crowd-pleaser—there are tactics, careers at stake here. Wayne sounds dire. Earlier this year, he turned Kelly Rowland’s “Motivation” from a decent-enough slow jam with a great beat into something far weirder and perhaps even gender-forward (what with the kitchen metaphors and “hold me like a conversation”)...at least for Weezy. Carter IV works similarly, centered around subtle but razor-sharp lyrics that focus and complicate the other personalities that appear throughout, including his own less-inspired verses.

If not the best, IV‘s lyrics might be the most precise of his career. He may no longer indulge in the narrative insanity that gave birth to Tha Carter III’s (2008) “Dr. Carter,” but in turn we’re served heavier, harder-to-parse punchlines. “President Carter” at first seems to miss the “assassinate me, bitch” apoplexy the Jimmy Carter-sampling premise promises, but by the end of the track in sneaks a “I change the stars on the flag into crosses,” subtly rearranging lines like “you dead to me / brown grass nigga” into something so much more layered than it sounded at first listen. And “Six Foot Seven Foot” is the apotheosis of this new direction, of this elemental Wayne, of shorter pay-offs, dizzying in their brevity and quantity, with grad school one-liners, all “I got through that sentence like a subject and a predicate.” Despite the song’s ubiquity, it still astounds, boasting a pure linguistic glee almost unmatched in Weezy’s whole oeuvre; see Cory Gunz write the verse of his life, see him stumble over himself to keep up.
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