This doesn’t mean he’s no longer writing elaborate peans to oral sex, or that he doesn’t dis faceless “hos”-he just does those things to praise the girl he loves.
A remarkably large portion of the album devotes itself to songs of devotion-ballad backings with soaring melodic choruses around which Wayne mumbles about his main squeeze, whom listeners can assume is his girlfriend, Christina Milian. The truth is that the foursome talk does feel a bit forced.
You could say something similar about “I’m That Nigga,” whose infectious beat recalls a malfunctioning cyborg but whose boasts crest, weakly, with, “I’m having foursomes / Don’t have to force ‘em.” “I Feel Good” squanders its no-doubt pricey James Brown sample by serving up a rap with next to no quotables. Naturally, he says, “bitches want to sleep with my remains.”īut soon, the manic-spitter shtick begins to feel a bit put-on, hollow. On the next track, “He’s Dead,” Wayne, using an oddly loping verbal cadence, buries his Cash Money career and walks the land as newly undead. For track 1, “Glory,” that keyword is “shit,” and what results is a revolting yet creative flood of puns about stenches, coffee, coffee-related stenches-at one point, he crowns himself “Porta-Potty Tunechi.” If the gross-out factor outweighs the entertainment factor for you, it’s probably best to turn back now. More than ever, he appears to be writing off of self-created prompts, picking a keyword and riffing on it. “I won't let u down as a fan.”įor the first couple tracks, the album is, if not flames, at least hot enough to generate some excitement that listeners are in store for classic Wayne-which is to say filthy, entertaining, hugely imaginative nonsense. “I honestly gotta say that this #FWA album is my best work yet!” he tweeted. But FWA, released exclusively to Jay Z’s new streaming platform Tidal, is supposed to make people forget all that. His output lately has been widely seen as inferior to the material of the late-Bush/early-Obama years when he credibly claimed to be the Best Rapper Alive. His much-anticipated Tha Carter V album languishes on a computer somewhere, the victim of ugly fighting between Wayne and his longtime label boss and former mentor, Birdman of Cash Money Records. It’s certainly not surprising to hear a rapper thrilled with all the sex and drugs he has access to, but you can’t take for granted this particular rapper’s state of mind these days. We know this because the third song on his new release, Free Weezy Album, is called “I Feel Good.” It samples the “I feel good part” of James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good),” and features Wayne sayings like, “I feel good / I'm smoking that good / I feel good / my girl got that good / yeah!”