Words by Max Feldman

Lil Wayne’s The Rebirth is a flawed record, but it’s by no means the rap-metal stillborn that some media sources would have us believe. It’s oddly sequenced, lacking the sort of compartments that chart-primed records require, and it approximates heavy metal’s most obvious signifiers without satisfying their particularities. However, it’s a welcome, wildly eccentric, experiment from everyone’s favourite Derridean MC. Weezy’s previous offering Tha Carter III took him from being a mixed metaphor, a rising star shot from a loose cannon, to a paralogic talent- a surface-to-air slam poet. It was a challenge, lacing club bangers with linguistic aporias, uneven and hypnotic samples beneath stream-of-consciousness social commentary. In some ways, we are here being offered a similar opportunity, but this time we’ve got to confront our preconceptions about rap-rock fusion. The Rebirth is to Limp Bizkit what Tha Carter III was to a Chamillionaire record. It has similar grills, but what it expresses is very different.

This effort holds up a warped mirror to our notions of “rock star” behaviour. It has all the necessary constituents: long hair, indifference, scrambled symphonies written on the backs of pizza boxes. What it lacks, for better or worse, are any obnoxious cocaine-burnout by-products. It’s a “guesstimated” sum of those fantasies, of italic dreams glamorising “Paradise City”. Unfortunately, songs like “Prom Queen” and “On Fire” get all Good Will Hunting. They’re furiously chalked sketches of equations without any of the toil. They’re hyper-compressed and curdled by autotune, making brooches from Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreaks.

Opener “American Star” sets the scene: a meeting of buzzsaw guitars and ghetto gospel. It implies that the rock star clichés that Wayne indulges are a part of contemporary Americana. What isn’t clear, however, is whether he’s emulating them or buying into them wholesale. “Ground Zero” is a rumbling paranoid crisis, a listed last rites, while ultraviolent standout “Drop The World” is an intergalactic revenge fantasy. Here, Wayne’s world migrates to hyperspace and we witness his head implode- perhaps caused by rage, perhaps by the vacuum of space. It’s as if his leftover fancy of ‘playing basketball with the moon’, as documented on career-highlight “I Feel Like Dying”, had become tainted by performance enhancing drugs rather than his beloved drank and toke.

The Rebirth is the event of Weezy’s vision of rock being covered and beaten by contemporary hip-hop paper methodology. It’s even more confusing than the rest of his output, guilty of reducing rock and/or roll to juvenile guitar pyrotechnics. It might be the lowest common denominator, but maybe this is just what we need to tackle Abercrombie-clad homogeneity. By being such a deviation from the accepted limits of emceeing, or the confines of “urban” music, The Rebirth highlights just how important Wayne is for the future survival of ambition-inflected hop. Even in its glorious, arrogant, mediocrity, this is probably still the best nu-metal record ever made. A decade on from teenage complaints of “everything being, like, so unfair” being consolidated by ‘devil’s horn’ hand gestures Papa Roach records, it is interesting to see someone treat let the nu-metal idea open up some sonic possibilities. The Rebirth, then, is hardly runt of the litter- it’s not a dissatisfying listen, but it’s an unsound essay on how music history is written at the peripheries of bandwagons. Ultimately, if this record teaches us one thing, it’s that we’ve got to learn from Wayne’s example and take our protracted metaphors to their logical conclusion, appreciating The Rebirth qua ‘The Rebirth’ (Universal Motown, 2010).