On today's mix...
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III

It's the album everyone's talking about today, and the consensus is clear: Lil Wayne really is that good. Tha Carter III's 16 full-blooded songs--no interludes!--prove that the club-ready "Lollipop" was, in fact, Wayne dumbing down his act. He's on fire here on every track, and it's one of few rap albums ever to reach such a level of consistency.

The first few songs seem clearly poised for singledom, and as is proper, they embrace all the cliches: boasting, decadence, homophobia, misogyny. But Weezy impresses by dropping so many great lines in the process that the seemingly inevitable fallbacks are much too easily forgivable. Similarly, the music throughout is hardly breaking new boundaries, never veering far from that disposable club dreck you spend so much effort avoiding, but it's only a minor annoyance. The rapping is the star here, and his producers are at least giving him their relative best. At worst you'll be thinking, "Hey, I guess that shit's popular for a reason."

That being said, every song on this album is poised to be a huge hit. If most popular rap songs survive off of two or three great lines, every song on Tha Carter III offers a dozen or more. Even the Hurricane Katrina song and the tributes to his daughter are effective, something you might not suspect from the comic persona dominant on the majority of the album. Rap is, obviously, not my area of expertise, but Tha Carter III is an album that demands attention. I'm happy to hear that it lives up to the hype. It will easily top many year-end lists, and it may very well end up being the first rap album I've truly loved.

9/10