#carter 6

I've been doing this music shit a long time. My taste is the best it's ever been and it continues to improve, day after day, year after year, and decade over decade. I've seen my listening habits shift from simply being a music enthusiast to a full music authority.

Part of this path to enlightenment is just the belief that you can find the beauty in music that others would call trash. And we do have to unpack that word "trash" a bit here, when we talk about Lil Wayne's album Tha Carter 6. But let me start with a harsh truth, something I don't really want to say but I think it bears mentioning to contextualize this conversation:

Not everyone's opinion about music holds equal weight.

Yes, music is subjective. That means that there are no objective metrics on which to score music. HOWEVER. And this is important!!! The approach at which you might decide on how to listen and evaluate music informs your reception of the music.

See, we're in the playlist and algorithm era right now. People who have the time and dedication to listen to full albums are becoming few far and between. Carter 6 is filled to the brim with different influences that come together and make a thrilling experience from start to finish. And if you don't grasp those influences, this isn't going to work for you. Does that mean the album is bad? No, it means where you are at in your music journey, you're unable to grasp the work.

The album starts off with a cut that long time Wayne fans should appreciate, "Welcome To The Carter." From here on out we start to hop through many different styles: the old school Run DMC/LL Cool J homage of "Bells" the Texas lean (no pun intended) of "Hip-Hop," and the Jelly Roll/Big Sean assisted "Sharks" set the tone nicely. But this is merely the beginning. "Banned from NO" pulls from N.O.R.E.'s "Banned From TV" and updates the drums with a modern day twist.

"The Days" featuring Bono is the only outright bad track on here. The whole vibe is straight out a 2010's "B.o.B - Airplanes" Pandora station. Yet it's still Wayne showing his versatility and at this point a theme is emerging, this is a wildly experimental album and no two songs sound the same.

"Cotton Candy" featuring 2 Chainz is one of my favorites on this whole thing. As of now, the sample hasn't been found but I must find it. The saxophone that's lurking in the background is just to die for, both Wayne and Chainz rise to the occasion of the track, and that guitar at the end is reminiscent of an 80s new wave song that I can't place.

"Flex Up" is another highlight on here. It's a very Future/Thug type trap track that shows that, despite how he portrays himself in interviews, he is still on the pulse on what's going on in hip-hop.

From here we get three rock inspired tracks: "Island Holiday" is a straight rework of Weezer's "Island in the Sun" that works way better than I thought it would. It trades the "hip hip" of the original with "sip sip" and it's in this moment I thought man, Shaboozey is punching air that he didn't think of this first, because this sounds like the exact type of flip that he'd try to pull off.

"Loki's Theme" carries that YG/West Coast bounce before morphing into something that resembles Lil Uzi's aspirations into rock music. Again, this is something that you would never expect and Wayne is just throwing paint all over the canvas trying to see what sticks.

"If I Played Guitar" is a Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah interpolation. Do I need to say any more about this one? Because apparently people are too tasteless to appreciate what's going on here. The sincerity of Wayne's vocal really works for this track, and this stretch of songs sounds like what Rebirth might have sounded if it had more polish and better execution.

"Peanuts 2 N Elephant" is the most unlikely good song on this album. I actually find it fucking hilarious, and I was grinning like a damn idiot when I heard him trying to deliver these lines with a straight face over a beat that has been called Crash Bandicoot background music, punctuated by elephant noises. It definitely recalls the freewheeling excellence he was doing on Drought 3, and he sounds like he's having a blast doing it. This song is produced by Lin Manuel Miranda, aka, the guy who made Hamilton.

"Rari" featuring his son, Kameron Carter, has a hyperpop lean to it which recalls Namasenda's "Vvolvo" - a musical touchpoint that even on an album as experimental as this, I wouldn't dream of hearing. It's just cool as hell that he'd do this and skipping ahead, has another song, "Mula Comin In" with his son Neal Carter (credited as "Lil Novi"). "Mula Comin In" is a Carti-style track and across both of these tracks, I love that Wayne is meeting his sons where they are on what songs they wanted to make.

"Maria" is incredible. Featuring Wyclef, it marries an opera sample with trap drums, and it's actually baffling that THIS isn't the track Lin Manuel Miranda produced lmao.

"Bein Myself" is Mannie Fresh in his bag in what be the most conventional song on the record. The sample is from Dionne Warwick and is simply amazing.

"Alone in the Studio With My Gun" might have worked better with Kodak subbed out, but I love the vibe that mgk brings to this one (and I shouldn't have. It just works.) Perhaps you could have had a better song with The Kid Laroi both on the hook and replacing the Kodak verse, but I still think it's a good song overall and that chorus is just too catchy for words.

In short though - I don't understand what album people were listening to. This is chock full with ideas and from one song to the next you get a different vibe with Wayne trying to adapt to what the song calls for.

It's sad, because I know we were losing the cultural collective moment with the advent of Spotify individualism, and media literacy seems like it's at an all-time low, but the divisiveness and dismissiveness that this album provoked out of people kind of draws my point home.

The people who actually like music and care to dissect it are sort of like the scientists of every disaster movie trying to inform the world of impending doom as they're pushed away by some commander who wants to instead steamroll head-first into the chaos.

Trump vs musk