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But the diminutive rap dynamo born Dwayne Carter still seems haunted.
Sadness doesnt care what your bona fides are.
Detractors dont disappear when youre on the right path.
The most anticipated rap album of this half of the decade opens and closes with a mothers tears.
British singer Sampha intones the title of the track in the background like wisdom gleaned from a timeworn sample.
The message is simple: Stay.
Wayne is one of the architects of modern hip-hops manic sprawl.
C5is most fun when Wayne is spitballing syllables at light speed.
Dope Niggas revisits Dr. Dres Xxplosive alongside Snoop Dogg, and Open Safe skates over a DJ Mustard production.
Tha Carter Vis almost surgically all-inclusive.
There are nods to every region of American rap music and nearly every era of Wayne.
Start This Shit Off Right reunites him with Ashanti and Mannie Fresh.
I Love You Dwayne is followed by Dont Cry, which features an eerie, unnerving vocal from XXXTentacion.
After that, Dedicate sagely mixes reggae, screw music, and a shout-out from Barack Obama.
The Special Delivery remake hits immediately afterward.
The choppy sequencing of the first quarter of the album gives way to a series of drippy ballads.
Drake, modern hip-hops biggest hitmaker, came to rap celebrity as a ward of Cash Money Records.
Kendrick Lamar, perhaps our sharpest thinker, once rhymed overCarter 3instrumentals and called the mixtapeC4.
Young Thug, our most delightful weirdo, pressed Wayne in 2015 by naming an excellent albumBarter 6.
Barring the Kendrick spot,Tha Carter Vpresents a world where most of these developments never happened.
Maybe Wayne doesnt need them.
Travis Scott seems redundant in the presence of raps master mumbler on Let It Fly.
(Really, the only rapper that really gets a piece of him here is Snoop Dogg.
Kendrick comes close and then disappears into histrionics.)
Maybe it was important to keep outside interference at a minimum.
The result is his strongest work since 2009sNo Ceilings.
He has suggested that this would be his last album in the past.
Hed be nuts to stop now.
