dedleg.com

It was with great hesitation that I downloaded the latest mashup album to float into my net, (500) Days of Weezy. For one thing, I haven’t seen (500) Days of Summer, because I heard it was for people who enjoy crying, and the album employs the film’s soundtrack as samples for all of the beats. Additionally, I’m just really fucking tired of Lil’ Wayne. I’m glad he went to jail. That’s right, I said it. I think we all needed a break from Weezy, personally. And Weezy probably needed a break from rotting his stomach with children’s prescription cough syrup.

This is not a mashup album, this is an album about Wayne. 

In any case, (500) Days of Weezy turned out to be quite a surprise, loaded with some of the most enjoyable and surprising mashups I’ve heard lately. A major reason the album is so compelling is the moodiness created by samples from classic Morrissey and Simon & Garfunkel songs, interspersed with clips of Wayne’s revealing interview with Katie Couric. The fact that producer My Sick Uncle was able to create something that sounds this honest and new out of entirely derivative material is an achievement.

People are quick to dismiss mashups, both music snobs and music morons alike, and it’s not entirely undeserved. Today, a simple A + B mashup is about as done to death as J. Howard Marshall. It’s hard to take a shitty song and make it not shitty, but that’s exactly why good mashups are impressive. I’m more than happy to let a bunch of geeks with laptops and beards do what they can to salvage the dreck today’s starlets hurl upon the charts.

Fortunately, since most of the obvious blends have been thoroughly plundered at this point, hopeful mashup DJs have been forced to get a little more creative. Lately, a bevy of mashup concept albums have been released. While this can be something of a hit or miss endeavor, they’re still some of the most original remix projects I’ve heard in a long time. As it turns out, there’s plenty of gold left to be mined if you abandon the Top 40 meets Top 40 formula. Huge surprise, I know.

To be honest, this is the best Lil’ Wayne material I’ve heard in a long time. There are miles more depth here than in the stillborn Rebirth. And the unusual collection of instrumentals backing his rhymes are a welcome breath of fresh air for the hoarse rapper whose sound has gotten significantly watered down due to over saturation. Instead of generic club bangers and weird autotuned rap ballads about getting your dick sucked, we get an entirely unique product: something… well, something worth listening to.

Alright, enough is enough, you guys. If you’re going to do a collaboration, at least do it with Bagel Bites or Mountain Dew… you know, a respectable company that has a legitimate history with skateboarding.

I mean, Jesus Christ, all Lil’ Wayne wears are Skytops and everybody knows you can’t actually skate in those! I dunno, Steve… maybe it’s time for you to re-watch Questionable and think about what that title really means.

Rebirth… how about Retard instead? As in “this album is so stupid it must be retarded.” Are you following me?

If you haven’t heard it yet, imagine a Sega Genesis whining through humorless anthems written by a snotty 10^th grader for about an hour straight. That would be better than this.

So what’s the fucking deal? Lil’ Wayne’s foray into assisted suicide has been legally available since Tuesday and nobody on any of the blogs I read feels like talking about what a spectacular trainwreck this album is? How it’s a failure in a genre comprised almost entirely of failures? No?

Well this can mean only one of two things. Either you all love it and I should officially consider one Weezy F. Baby as the first horseman of the apocalypse, or you were all much smarter than I and didn’t even bother to check it out in the first place.