Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter V" and Kanye's "Yandhi" mark the end of an era – Rolling Stone



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The third studio album of Kanye West, Graduation, sold 957,000 copies in its first week of 2007. A year later, Lil Wayne Tha Carter III sold over a million. Two albums, two generational talents, both reach their commercial nadirs – they are sacred and an era of rap at its peak. Now, a tumultuous decade later, one has the impression that this era is ending.

At best, Wayne and Kanye deconstructed the rapper into two distinct and iconoclastic archetypes. Wayne was a rapper rapper who lived only to make music – as loud as possible – and Kanye was trying to convince a world back on the fact that hip-hop could be a cutting edge art. Wayne built his career by launching everything he recorded, until he was eaten by the machine. Kanye was the most thoughtful rapper alive, until he became the least reflective. The characters they both played made the popular image of a rapper inseparable from the biggest stars on the planet and put hip-hop on new tracks with the release of each album. Ten years later, the six years of waiting for the Tha Carter V and the ostensible remake of West Yeezus This is probably the end of a period when the commercial and creative impact of each artist led the pack, even as both projects evoked the influence they had on gender.

Wayne built a character based on the channeling of his uncontrolled imperfection. Fluid, random, imperfect. Before social media and streaming made it necessary for humanity to develop the need to share everything, Wayne published everything – droughts, Dedications, No ceilings. The purity of Weezy's musical inventory made him the only candidate for the best living rapper. Jay Z and Mike Jones the songs were billed as well. He was going to destroy everyone of them anyway.

Tha Carter V seeks to mythify this time. A Barack Obama's speech of 2009 ("We can not all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne") and viral deposit video, are snapshots that book and start songs. A sample of 2 Chainz commemorates the Devotion career phase of Wayne. Her biological child (Reginae Carter) and her metaphorical children (Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott) spend their time paying homage. The surprise is not how the album juggles with these disparate moments, but adds warmth and depth to the selfish act of commemorating and reaffirming its influence. It works like Wayne's choice of being the best rapper alive in the mid-2000s, forcing himself before anyone else. The facts are facts.

On the other hand, the character played by Kanye for most of the last decade is an unbridled perfectionist. A rigid and emotional egoist. Post WestGraduation The career seemed driven by an obsession with changing the paradigm of pop music as much as humanly possible. 808s & Heartbreak, My beautiful dark twisted fantasy and Yeezus presented rap in all its nuances – minimalist, maximalist, classic, avant-garde. This was never enough. If Wayne was competing for the title of Best Live Rapper, Kanye was fighting until hip-hop was not a genre; c & # 39; was the kind.

Kanye's followers are now the most popular stars of the day. J. Cole and Travis Scott, who followed the arcs of Ye's rapper-producer, released two of the best-selling albums of the year, regardless of genre. Chance the Rapper, Mr. Sentient Abandoned college, looks at his apparent heir role and revives the album, Good ass jobthat we thought lost for good. And then there is Drake. The most indebted artist of Kanye's first sacrifices and Wayne's paternal counsels is now the biggest hip-hop pop-hop ever created. His current suffocation on the zeitgeist is one of the most important factors of a crisis of identity in the West.

"The sovereign, the king," said Kanye The New York Times, explaining how his evolution in hip-hop affects him. "And it's that thing that looks like O.K., you're not rapper # 1, rapper # 1 Drake."

The chaotic and offensive deployment for Yandhi, as youThis year threatens to tarnish Kanye's character. He returns to the poisoned well of his infamous TMZ appearance when he redesigns a Make America Great Again hat and wears it when Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He loses his credibility when he continues, despite all better judgment, to speak of slavery as if it was a state of mind and not of himself. a system of oppression. West's year 2018 gives the impression of drawing attention. He sold the sales game to Lil Wayne (via a tweet that looked like an insurance policy), but did not recognize that Logic, a Kanye descendant kidnapped by a generation, would probably overtake them.

Tha Carter V, Conversely, succeeded in immortalizing the times gone by Wayne reigned. It does not make an album at the forefront of what the rap might look like – the record has moments that could fit into the last five years of hip-hop – but it's comfortable in its stasis. Nostalgic, triumphant and poignant, Tha Carter The fifth episode is an epic and casual story about a man stripped of the very thing he lived in his thirties, just as he was during his childhood. On the next album, "Let It All Work," Wayne details his suicide attempt at age 12, undertaking after his mother prevented him from rapping.

"Put the gun on my heart and think," Wayne spits. "I needed too much awareness to be smart about it, too torn, I aim where my heart was pounding.

Wayne on Tha Carter V is a boxer entering the ring, with the public wondering if he has exceeded his peak. Over the last six years, he has had to fight his label and his lawyers to control his career, as his past faded and newcomers arrived in droves. Fortunately, the obstacles did not beat him.

With the whole world watching, the best living rapper came back for one night, his title resumed for a while.

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