When Wayne does step outside the margins it’s for a saccharine acoustic ballad, “How to Love,” that sounds like the work of a milquetoast soft-rock band with a shaky lead singer. Predictable cameos from Auto-Tune maven T-Pain, gangsta Rick Ross and R&B crooner John Legend don’t help dispel doubts that Wayne has covered this territory before, with more exciting results. Yet many of his performances sound strangely circumscribed, as if hemmed in by the repetitive subject matter – even Wayne sounds bored by trying to flip yet one more clever couplet about blunts and ‘hos. Wayne hunts for gratification, as if trying to bed as many women as possible while outrunning a multitude of bullets. Sex is less about pleasure than distraction, a means of blocking out the world. “This a crazy world and life is shorter than Bushwick,” Wayne raps on “Megaman,” referring to the Geto Boys’ diminutive Bushwick Bill. With his frequent allusions to clocks and hour glasses filled with gunpowder, Wayne is preoccupied with mortality and how a mega-star makes the most of the time he has left. His prison term gets only glancing references, but it’s clearly a subtext for many of the tracks.
But he sounds slower, more methodical, less unhinged on “Tha Carter IV.” His flights of fancy still pop up occasionally, whether likening MCs to tiramisu and short-bread in “ President Carter,” declaring that “real G’s move in silence like lasagna” in “6 Foot 7 Foot” or contemplating the clouds buried in his fingernails on “Nightmares of the Bottom.” But they’re not nearly as plentiful or sustained as on his best albums. At his best, Wayne was positively psychedelic in his wordplay, capable of creating entire alternative worlds out of a few surrealist metaphors. The years-in-the-making “Tha Carter IV” (Universal Motown/Cash Money) is designed to restore Lil Wayne’s reputation, but it falls short.
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