Spencer Lund

You Poor Sober Bastards!

This was my common refrain for the first 27.86 years of my life. The myth goes as such: the narcotics found in nature, or discovered in the synthetic laboratory of man, have helped to embellish or augment the “art” of hundreds thousands millions most if not all “artistes.” This is horseshit. Even at my hedonistic apogee, I never once thought drugs and drink made me a better anything, but a lot of appreciators/critics STILL feel this way.

Read most of Rimbaud’s poetry, and you’ll notice themes about the numbing of the senses, and his poetry facilitated the advents of existentialism and postmodern thought in a number of 20th century artists. A Season in Hell might be a direct result of little Arthur’s hashish smoking with his partner in crime Paul Verlaine. Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Salvadore Dali are four more pop culture friendly examples. They extolled the virtues of drinking and drugging to open up the mind and expand the art which they created. There are a million more examples both large and small where alcohol and narcotics have seemingly become the elixir of creativity needed to transcend the corporeal body, with its livers and nervous systems, to reach the pinnacle of artistic expression. Except, all these artists didn’t need drugs to create. They flourished despite their panorama of drug use.

Most recently, Lil’ Wayne dropped his new album Tha Carter IV, and Village Voice scribe Andy Hutchins wrote

Nearly all of the attributes that once made Wayne great seem to have deserted him, leaving a husk of an artist with diminished heart, soul, and mind.

C4 is Lil Wayne’s first post-incarceration album, and theoretically his first post-narcotic album: terms of his probation in an Arizona drug possession case (unrelated to the New York gun charge that got Weezy his extended stay on Rikers Island) include a three-year ban on drugs and alcohol. That should mean no lean, no blunts, no “big tall glass of Some Shit You Can’t Pronounce-ier,” as Wayne rapped on his 2010 stopgap album I Am Not A Human Being; unfortunately, it may also mean a thoroughly uninteresting Wayne, if C4 is any indication.

Maybe Andy is right, and without his blunts and purple drank, Lil Wayne is nothing more than a mediocre rhyme-slinger stuck in “two phrases per bar” messages of misogyny like equally uninteresting Rick Ross. I’ll agree that Rick Ross makes my blood curdle, and should never be gifted with the title Master of Ceremony, but Rick Ross never released anything even half as dope as the majority of Weezy’s early discography.

And how about that early set of recordings when he was still the little tyke at Cash Money Records? Was Lights Out or 500 Degreez as poetic or incendiary as Tha Carter albums? Because Weezy was lighting spliffs and dranking purple then too.

I agree C4 isn’t as good as his earlier albums, but I don’t agree with Andy’s inference that a lack of the purple drank or haze is somehow the culprit. Lil’ Wayne spent a significant amount of time in prison. Riker’s Island is man’s prison. That’s not exactly the best environment for artistic nourishment. At Rikers, it’s about surviving, and making it to the next day. While there have certainly been instances where art has been created under the most trying of circumstances, Weezy isn’t used to writing rhymes in a cell block.

Aside from the incarceration, Lil’ Wayne is a rapper, and emcee’s at that level are a bit like tennis players. There’s only a short window where you can prove yourself, then you’re stuck with Father Time like all of us. Read any new album reviews from Eminem immortalized in the pages of Rolling Stone lately?

In hip-hop there’s often a coronation, “the best rapper alive,” and then a series of sometimes sophomoric albums that don’t live up to the hype. Hype has always come with hip hop, but some of the biggest names in the game have come out with dismal efforts shortly after 5-mic worthy recordings. Nas’ Illmatic is still his greatest achievement as an emcee, and he recorded it when he was 19. Same with Rimbaud, who stopped writing entirely at 20, and had everyone convinced he was dead. He just got older.

Before lambasting Wayne’s most recent effort as a substandard byproduct of sobriety, why not attribute it to the more likely culprit: time. The passage of time can soften even the hardest of syrup-laced artists. Some artists get better with time, but a lot of the prominent ones burn brightly near the sun, and fall like Icarus. Maybe if some artists listened to Daedalus’s advice we’d get them longer.

The vast majority of people, and the vast majority of artists aren’t reliant on drugs for inspiration. They create because that’s what they were born to do. They might have added some elements to change things up (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band comes to mind), but at the end of the day if you asked Weezy which he would give up first: Purple Drank and Herb, or writing rhymes outside a jail cell, he would always take the former. He’s an artist regardless of what a pee test might say.

Lil Wayne didn’t spend the last month of his prison sentence in solitary confinement for getting caught with some promethazine or an L. He got caught with an mp3 player.

Critics and reviewers can hypothesize about anything in the medium they’re reviewing, but when some 15 year-old kid that wants to rap, but can’t mimic a Dr. Seuss heroic couplet—let alone string together the verses in A Milli, reads a review of Wayne’s new album and see’s the onus for his drop-off placed with his new-found sobriety, what do you think he’s gonna do?

Hold on, I gotta get lifted before I finish this.

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