Please use the thread to discuss the selections and inform everybody of your voting intentions. A poll will be added at a later date in order to tally votes, once everybody has had the opportunity to listen to all of the selections. If there are specific links to the albums or singles you have nominated (on Youtube, Spotify, etc.) that you would prefer voters to listen to, please post them in this thread. _________________ 2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
Last edited by Skinny on 03/16/2021 20:23; edited 1 time in total
Not gonna lie, the only album here i've heard in it's entirity is Hell Hath No Fury, and even that's due for a re-listen. The singles are all stellar, though, so this should be quite the ride.
- There are a lot of albums I didn't enjoy on first listen and later came around to like, and in most cases I can recognize what it was about the album that required a few listens to click. Hell Hath No Fury is not one of those albums. The first 2 or 3 times I heard it, it did absolutely nothing for me. But on the next listen, it pretty instantly became a favorite, and I have no clue why it took more than like half a listen for me to fall in love. Maybe the setting was just right that time? Anyway, it's immaculately produced and both MCs really bring it. I don't think it has the highs of Lord Willin', but it's end to end great outside of that "Keys open doors" hook that gets pretty irritating because it's repeated so much. But outside of that I have nothing bad to say about it.
- On the other team there's Jeffrey. I was always intrigued by Young Thug but never really found a project of his that hit for me until this one. It's probably partially the length - just 9 songs (I guess technically 10 but "Pick Up the Phone" always felt out of place here) that are pretty much all terrific, much like on HHNF. Floyd Mayweather is probably the weak link, but even there it's just a ton of fun to listen to everyone trade verses. But Thugger is definitely the highlight, he feels completely free from any confines of beats or flows. The opener is one of my favorites and on the first verse his flow switches up like three times, with my favorite being the part that start swith "Shop at Saks Fifth, flow on DatPiff." The chorus of Swizz Beats is another highlight, as is pretty much all of Webbie and Popman / Kanye West (I once read someone, probably on RYM, describe Young Thug's flow on parts of Webbie as a Boomhauer flow and I cannot unhear that now).
As for the other albums, this was my first listen to any Lil Wayne mixtape and I really enjoyed it. The length is pretty clearly a problem but it's not like you're supposed to listen to it in one focused sitting anyway. Would have been the perfect thing to put on while gaming with friends in college if any of us were into this kind of thing at the time. As for Telefone, it's an album I've never really gotten into despite liking her follow-up to it. I relistened to it just last fall to see if it would click yet and had no luck, honestly can't even remember much about it now...
The singles are all great but I think I prefer 2006's, partially because they go well with the album picks. Because of that I'm leaning 2006. Happy to see this Earl song nominated though, I'd actually never heard it. This was my favorite period from him and I'm a bit disappointed that neither Chum nor anything from IDLSIDGO was nominated for other years. _________________ And it's hard to be a human being. And it's harder as anything else.
I never really wrote about my picks enough, so I'm going to do that this time.
Dedication 2 by Lil Wayne (aka Weezy, aka Birdman Jr. aka Mr. President, aka Young Tuna Fish) etc. etc. etc.
I'm not gonna mince words here. When Lil Wayne called himself the "best rapper alive" on track 4 of this mixtape he wasn't wrong. 15 years removed from this release, Lil Wayne couldn't not be further away from the spotlight. The last song I heard from him was this weird song he made about the Green Bay Packers. (Which is actually probably one of the better songs he's made recently?)
After the release of "Tha Carter III" Lil Wayne's credibility plummeted and I feel like he's mostly remembered by stupid internet kids as some sort of meme from the early 00's. And boy oh boy, did Wayne get shafted by boomer Dad rockers too. Just look at the ratings for his albums on this site. Even his best (including this mixtape) are rated like Nickelback or Creed albums. Due to his image and penchant for crudeness, I feel like he was made the scapegoat of many a white household for his corrupting influence on suburban youth. It reached the point to where Lil Wayne has become one of the most hated rappers in the game. But I think many people, myself included, are starting to come back to Wayne's wonder years between '04 and '08 for a relisten. People that grew up with his music as a big part of their lives want to know. Is it as good as we remember, or has it aged terribly?
I can say with certainty, after listening to this more than a few times since I picked '06 as my team, that it exceeded all expectations. I even find myself being more than a little ashamed at some of the mean things I've said about Wayne in the past. (Although some have definitely been deserved, because he's been involved in a lot of shit.) All of the point of this being that when Wayne was in his prime I would have called him top 5. The looser structure of the mixtape format really allows his idiosyncrasies, both as a person and a rapper, to really shine through on these tracks.
Take "Cannon" for example. Easily on of the highlights of the album. Wayne's verse on here is too fucking good. The humor, the flow, the cadence, and the wordplay just make it so damn fun to listen to. I think my favorite thing about a lot of the Wayne lyrics is that they're the kind that if you were sitting around with a group of friends and you all heard something as ridiculous as,
"That's the AK-47, make his neighborhood love me
Bullets like birds, you can hear them bitches humming
Don't let that bird shit, he got a weak stomach
Niggas know I'm sick: I don't spit, I vomit—got it?
One egg short of the omelet
Simon says: "Shoot a nigga in his thigh and leg
And tell him, 'Catch up,' like mayonnaise"; um—
...then you'd just stare at eachother and start laughing. This is music for a good time. And the whole album is full of bangers and bars like this. Yes, the length could be an issue, but I'm not going worry about that for this release.
Besides that verse, there's two others that got to me.
This one on "Walk It Off" is just so vile, it's hard not give some credit to somebody that can spit something like this.
Last week I met a bitch, but I forgot her name
Short sweet, red cute, ole vibrant thang
She got a earring in her pussy, ‘n’ everywhere else
She said she jog everyday so she can cum on herself
Then she tell me my love is the best she's felt
And she sucked my dick like it’s about to melt
She drink Vitamin Water, say it’s good for her health
She can wrap my whole dick around her waist like a belt
Then there’s another bitch, her name was Ayesha
She ride that dick good and make a mean cheese pizza
One time it was so good, I told her to order one mo'
She said it’s not Domino's -- its DiGiorno's
There’s another bitch I met her at the Gong Show
Got her to the crib and turned it straight into a thong show
She do my dishes, wash my clothes and fix my corn rows
Besides those more classic Wayne verses, this album does have some seriously good insight into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Wayne was always a great representative of NO, and his feelings on the situation definitely come through on this album at several points.
Of course, from the closer, "Georgia Bush".
Hurricane Katrina, we should've called it Hurricane (Georgia) Bush
Then they telling y'all lies on the news
The white people smiling like everything cool
But I know people that died in that pool
I know people that died in them schools
Now what is the survivor to do?
Got to no trailer, you gotta move
Now it's on to Texas and to (Georgia)
They tell you what they want, show you what they want you to see
But they don't let you know what's really going on
Make it look like a lotta stealing going on
Boy them cops is killas in my home
The reason I'd isolate these three verses besides their lyrical content, is the fact that Wayne sounds completely different on each of these tracks. Listen to these three tracks back to back and you'll hear what I mean. His flow and even his vocal inflection are totally different on each song. It's really kind of eye (or is it ear?) opening for me, because I always felt that Lil Wayne lacked some versatility in his delivery, but that's not a problem on this album.
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Besides the rapper, the DJ on the mixtape matters too, and DJ Drama was also at the top of his game for this. I love the choices for samples on this album, and the contemporary hits that dot this album make it all the better. Some of the songs used on here were even possible choices for 2006 singles including "Poppin My Collar", "What You Know", and "Hustlin". The album has a good progression, and even though it's 80 minutes long, it's varied enough to keep a listener interested through it's duration.
I'll talk about "Hell Hath No Fury" tomorrow probably.
Lil Wayne is certainly one of the more divisive figures in hip-hop's history, though I feel there has definitely been a critical reappraisal in the past decade or so and that more and more people are waking up to the idea that he was the most inventive and most exciting figure in mainstream rap during those peak years you mentioned, roughly '04 through '08. (A similar thing has happened with Gucci Mane, another figure who drew derision from hip-hop traditionalists at the time, but whose standing only appears to have risen in the years since as his influence on a new generation - or two - has become undeniable. Nice to see that you've picked both in this tournament.) There will always be those who are turned off by one or more of the aspects of his music - his unabashed materialism, his regular use of auto-tune, his flagrant crossover attempts - and he faced a very real anti-South bias that thankfully appears to diminish with each passing year, but his rapping (during his peak) had a really gleeful, mischievous energy to it that was displayed in his wide range of manic, often melodic flows and his borderline surrealist wordplay. I used to pay some attention to that whole "best rapper alive" argument, and still sometimes use the phrase, but it's a futile endeavour - how does one compare Wayne with, say, Blu, or DOOM, when those artists are at least as different from one another as U2 are from Bad Brains, or Half Japanese? Anyway, Wayne had as much right as anybody to claim it around this time. Nobody, to my ears, was as consistently thrilling on the mic during that period. Great choice and writeup. _________________ 2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
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