Bear with me for a moment, but who remembers the plot to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me? It’s OK, we can recap. In the film, Dr Evil invents a time machine which enables him to go back in time and steal Powers’ mojo, momentarily imbuing Evil with the charm and charisma of the rug-chested 60s swinger. Heather Graham stars as the sassy CIA agent, Felicity Shagwell. Michael York is involved somehow, and at one point Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello do a song together. Actually, maybe this isn’t a useful analogy, but look, the point is that Lil Wayne could use a little of whatever his label-mate Mystikal is running on right now.
A decade ago this would seem unlikely. Weezy was on the cusp of the mid 00s run which would cement his name in the history books, while Mystikal was facing a six year stint behind bars. These two totems of New Orleans rap have experienced success in very different ways; one had his mic cut-off just after his commercial peak, while the other has burned himself out to a dull glow, with the smoke now growing increasingly toxic.
Listening to Lil Wayne at the moment is genuinely upsetting, like meeting an ex-partner who’s unrecognisable through some bullshit affectation they’ve picked up. All his old tricks are still there –the voice, the punchlines, the weirdness – but the generator which used to make it all work has long since packed up. When Weezy was at his peak he had complete control over his style, applying it to the popular (and some of the forgettable) rap tracks of the day with memorable results. On features, he knew how to turn good songs into great ones. He would interact with whatever was happening in rap better than anyone else, dismissing his rivals with a cutting succinctness. Take his clever, affecting post-Katrina verse from Outkast’s "Hollywood Divorce", his head-in-the-clouds "Sky is the Limit" freestyle, or the way he blurted out his soul onto Kanye’s "See You in My Nightmares". Here was a rapper who willed himself to be the best in the world enough to make it actually happen.Read the rest on Noisey
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