A tissue for your kindness
Is it possible to have died, but to still be alive?
Before today, I would have answered the same way you most likely did if you’re a sane, upright citizen of the community.
But none of us around these parts are, so I feel more comfortable to tell you that my unequivocal answer to that very strange and spiritual question is YES.
I count that at least one of us here on this very terra firma has achieved such feat.
His name is Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. But most of us know him (it?) as Lil Wayne.
How he achieved this, dear reader, I do not know. As you can tell from the prior paragraph, I’m not even sure what pronoun is appropriate anymore for my subject, but we will make due with “he.” All I hope to achieve in this testimony is to present the facts, sprinkled with some speculation, with hope that a smarter sentient will use what I’ve postulated here tonight and prove this immense scientific advancement once and for certain. This is beyond Schrodinger, or his cat.
A drought is an interesting concept to consider when waxing about Lil Wayne. It’s not just the name of one of his mixtape series. It’s the state of duress most of his fans have been in for the better part of a decade, perhaps not even fully realizing what was happening. The quantity of crops Wayne provides have been bountiful. We may not get an album every year, but we get songs, features, tours, even unfortunate reality show appearances, something to gnaw on. We’re still eating. It’s the quality I’m talking about.
When a man achieves the ubiquity Lil Wayne achieved in the mid and late aughts, he may get so high as to fly close to the sun. At this point, he has two options. Reduce his altitude, or melt like Icarus’ wings. Except, Wayne did neither.
During the release of Tha Carter III in 2008, Wayne did indeed take the fight that superstardom charts course for you willingly or not. When he arrived at the sun, in the year 2009, the result was a collection of sounds and wails and riffs called Rebirth that few of us expected and none of us wanted.
Wayne wasn’t kidding with the title. And although he wasn’t “reborn,” he did experience something equally altering.
I do believe this is when it happened. No longer a mortal instrument. Not a machine. Not even an extra terrestrial. And yes, I have heard those rumors. That he was abducted around this time in his career by aliens in a spaceship from a galaxy far away. Some eyewitness reports even say they were bumping Wayne’s section on Playaz Circle’s “Duffle Bag Boy” as they beamed him up. Is it possible? Sure. But I find this theory to have a multitude of plot holes, and I think my thesis of ‘Wayne as an immortal being’ is more plausible by a slim margin. A slim margin indeed, but a margin nonetheless and sometimes you die on a hill no matter how small it is. And that’s not to say Lil Wayne doesn’t fuck with aliens beings, because he fucks with them heavy.
2010 saw the release of I Am Not a Human Being. The “smoking laser.” He called it out in the title. While not a terrible collection of songs by any means, especially in comparison to its sequel, 11 years later it is now clear to see it as the impetus for what was to come.
Since then, we’ve been treated to a barrage of pornographic half-assery quite egregious to his self-proclaimed status as “greatest rapper alive.”
I for one am no prude. And neither certainly is Lil Wayne. When you have been as famous as he has been for as long as he has been, you’ve seen and done and accessed pretty much every thing and every orifice.
But god damn. I would like to listen to at least two new Lil Wayne song in a row without hearing how much pussy he ate for breakfast.
I now know in order to achieve that, I need to sequester myself in the early third his catalogue. Before this immortality business. Before he could coast on whatever silly, half-processed, unfiltered thought came to his consciousness and out of his mouth in a kloud of kush haze.
They say the human brain takes 600 milliseconds to process and articulate a word. I don’t know who “they” are but I fully believe they never anticipated Wayne’s nervous system, which may be cutting that time in half.
What it really comes down to is his creative style. Most of us baptized in Lil Wayne mythology know that, in 2003, the man stopped writing down his bars. Everything that has followed has been stream of consciousness, off the top and very much in the moment.
While that style has lead to some incredibly inspired lines, it’s also a completely unsustainable state of creative existence for the long haul.
The same style that earned Wayne a place in the hip-hop Hall of Fame, that made him one of the most innovative and influential rappers of all time, is now completely hamstringing his ability to make decent music, let alone innovate.
Simply put, he seems to have run out of anything interesting to say. The genre he created, the rappers he birthed. They have taken the torch and run many, many miles with it. Future and Young Thug and and many iterations of the name BABY have the spotlight now. New thresholds have been crossed, different styles have been popularized and the good days of his career may very well be behind him. And that’s what happens to the best.
This is why I have come to a hard yet honest conclusion. Lil Wayne is dead.
He’s still releasing music. He’s still very much alive in the sense of tangibility. But as always, listen to the bars. Look to the album titles. FWA (Free Weezy Album). Funeral. As a fan, I’ve had my Sunday blacks on for awhile now.
But it does really happen to the best and something of this nature has also happened or is happening to his contemporaries. Kanye West has gone Crazy for Christ and MAGA and thinks he might be the next President. Jay-Z is the human embodiment of capitalism. Eminem is Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. T.I. recovered from a bad run of legal issues with reality show appearances and mentions of his daughter’s hymen. Wiz Khalifa proved you can indeed smoke yourself stupid, and Ludacris is now 9th string in the Fast and Furious franchise.
This has gotten mean, which is the last thing I wanted to do on another hazy fever of a night in Los Angeles. But I guess the times themselves are mean, and I get the feeling that what 2020-2021 hath wrought thus far is only the equivalent of kicking up some dust in comparison to the real ass-kicker of a storm that is most certainly brewing. So while some of that last paragraph may be punching below the waistline and perhaps this entire piece is ill-advised, my mechanism for fuck-giving short-circuited sometime long ago with a lot of other things.
What this really is, believe it or not, is a love letter to Lil Wayne. I wanted to offer an explanation to anyone who was wondering the same things I was wondering. Namely, What the fuck happened? and Where did he go?
The case of Lil Wayne is not your average mystery, and it needs further investigation. Someone to really dig in and get to the veins and roots. Right here, right now, we’re only at the surface. I’m not one for trenches or buried treasure. I like it right where I am. But I’m planting a flag here before I leave. This could be a good place to dig, archaeologically-speaking.
There are also other answers to seek out there as well, such as, how many things does the F. in Weezy F. Baby really stand for? We may never truly know.
What happened to him, whether I’m right or wrong, is not necessarily a tragedy. Change is the natural metamorphosis of existence, it just goes better for some than it does for others. I already see the traces of this happening to Travis Scott, who is this decade’s Lil Wayne and may be one McDonald’s commercial away from the brink.
FORMER President Trump has pardoned Lil Wayne, and perhaps so should we. I’ll keep listening. So will you. But we’ll still reminisce for earlier days, and we’ll search for answers and turn to this half-assed explanation or others like it, and we will feel better not because we found answers but because we keep looking and know they may still be out there.