Weezy’s newest effort is a tragedy. He was obviously aware of it, too because he did just about everything he could to wipe away the hype surrounding this album. On January 23 of last year, he made the mistake of clarifying that “Rebirth” would be his rock album debut, not a re-release of “Tha Carter III” as was originally believed. After delaying the album, balking at multiple release dates, releasing four singles, changing the tracklist after an Amazon.com shipping error, it became apparent that “Rebirth” was never a good idea in the first place.
Weezy’s guitar playing is so bad that it makes this album unlistenable. Lil Wayne should’ve learned to play the guitar before he decided to become a “rock star.” Apparently those rumored lessons with Kid Rock didn’t pay off, to the embarrassment of both men. The riffs and chords on this album never rise above a beginner level-as his album cover suggests, his “rebirth” is nothing more than the product of several sessions of lazy doodling. If “Rebirth” is an indicator for Weezy’s influences, he must’ve been listening to the dregs of alt-rock from the past two decades. There are moments of electronic-inspired brilliance, but not enough to justify this nü-metal shitstorm. “Rebirth” should alienate Weezy’s fans; the lack of classic Tha Carter material pushes his core fans away, while the low-quality rock won’t appeal to a different crowd.
Weezy’s flow goes together with rock about as well as journalists and Vladimir Putin.
The Weezy formula for success is unbalanced; on “Tha Carter” albums’ smooth, minimalist beats perfectly contrast his arrhythmic, scratchy drawl. On “Rebirth,” the loud, distorted, and abrasive rock amplifies the more irritating nuances of Weezy’s delivery. The rock songs on “Rebirth” are so poorly recorded that listening to the album from start to finish becomes an exhausting effort.
By stripping away distortion and dropping the tempo and volume, Weezy’s brilliant flow takes flight. Lil Wayne shines on “Drop The World,” featuring a surprisingly well-suited verse by Eminem. “Runnin” has a slower, less chaotic beat that allows for him to show his more insightful side. Unsurprisingly, the only track to completely stick to Weezy’s old style sticks out like a sore thumb and at the same time, is one of “Rebirth’s” best. Sampling Amy Holland’s “She’s on Fire” from Scarface, “On Fire” is a welcome eighties flashback remixed with Weezy’s typical swagger. There are several enjoyable tracks that were inexplicably left off the album, like the guitar-minimalist single released last year, “Hot Revolver,” or the old school, rap-sampling, Beastie Boys-inspired “Fix My Hat” and “I’m Not Human.”
The majority of the album is a heavily-compressed mess. The most popular track on iTunes, “Knockout,” sounds like it was recorded by a crappy, screamo Blink-182 cover band with a chain-smoking lead singer. “The Price Is Wrong,” the final song on the album, is a perfect example of everything ‘wrong’ on Rebirth: low quality punk-metal interlaced with mindless lyrics delivered in Lil Wayne’s best impression of rage.
His rhymes straddle the line between brilliance and idiocy, but mostly fall to the latter category on “Rebirth.” For instance, from “Get a Life,” quite possibly the worst diss track ever recorded: “I say fuck you, get a life, man I got too much shit on my head to have to deal with all of you…I said fuck you…All I can say is get a life, quit your motherfuckin’ hatin’ n’ get a life, get money and get bitches and get a life, get goin’ get goin’…”
…or this gem from “One Way Trip (ft. Kevin Rudolf)”: “Woke up this morning with my dick to the ceiling, fell asleep with another chick from my building, kick her ass out and have breakfast like a motherfucker…I’m with another bitch by supper.” Accompany these words with vague genre imitations and uninspired, unoriginal guitar riffs, and you have an album unfit to even donate to charity.
If “Tha Carter III” is Bruce Lee, then Rebirth is Jean Claude van Damme: it would be heresy to compare the former to the latter. Let us all close our eyes, purge this album from our memories, and pray that a year at Riker’s Island will allow “Tha Carter IV” to reawaken our faith in the cash money millionaire.