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January 7, 2010

Jeremiah Tucker: Lil Wayne should stay in comfort zone

Lil Wayne: ‘Rebirth’

Rating: D

Last month the online retailer Amazon leaked hip-hop superstar Lil Wayne’s rock album “Rebirth” when it accidentally shipped 500 copies two months before its release date.

Since then Lil Wayne has pushed back the album’s release until June, but after listening to “Rebirth” this week, here are some other projects I’d like to see happen soon.

n The next Transformers movie featuring a screenplay by Maya Angelou.

n Oprah’s last show where she announces her replacement is Dick Cheney.

n Andy Rooney quitting “60 Minutes” to focus on his nationally syndicated sex-advice column.

More people need to get out of their comfort zones! And maybe these projects wouldn’t be as terrible as “Rebirth.” They probably would.

These are all truly awful ideas, after all, and I should reiterate that “Rebirth” is really very bad. In fact, after listening to the album all the way through, I’m unconvinced Lil Wayne has even listened to a rock record.

He obviously has a concept of what it means to be a rock star and sprinkled throughout “Rebirth” are over-the-top gestures: gratuitous electric guitar, a “Stairway to Heaven” reference, a wretched power ballad, a decent mall punk song, an awful hardcore punk song and numerous nods to ’80s hair metal.

At one point Wayne compares himself to Michael Jordan, and that is an apt comparison. “Rebirth” is kind of like Jordan quitting basketball to play baseball if all Jordan had known about baseball was the movie “Major League” and a couple of homerun contests he’d watched during the All-Star Games.

Not that I begrudge Wayne for making a rock album. “Rebirth” is far more entertaining than your garden-variety modern rock album.

Daughtry wishes he could make something with half the personality Wayne packs into this monstrosity. Even when Wayne, with his froggy croon, tries to sing banal rock lyrics like, “Your girlfriends say I ain’t the one, they hate it when I can call you,” he sounds all the weirder for it. Not enough artists are willing to fail this big.

Best tracks: “Get a Life,” “Drop the World (feat. Eminem).”



Vampire Weekend: ‘Contra’

Rating: B+

In a short profile about Vampire Weekend in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, the reporter notes that lead singer and lyricist Ezra Koenig is interested in “the semiotics of preppy clothes.”

This, in a nutshell, sums up most people’s problems with the natty Brooklyn band.

They met at Columbia University, they’re pretentious, they’re upper class and sing about upper-class stuff yet they have the audacity to borrow from third-world African pop or something — this is how the primary slight against the band is usually formed in the blog wars, anyway.

It’s funny that Vampire Weekend — an indie-pop band filled with baby-faced college-educated Paul Simon-acolytes — has become the most controversial band of the last couple of years.

How far we’ve come from ’90s gangsta rap! Still, it’s telling that most people would take issue with the band’s image, as the music itself is hardly worth such vitriol.

“Contra,” the band’s second album since getting signed to big independent label after its self-released debut album caught fire across the Internet, is essentially a bolder, more expansive version of the first record.

Koenig has grown as a vocalist and gives the songs a wider range of emotional nuance — especially in the album’s quiet closer “I Think Ur a Contra” when he sings, “You wanted good schools and friends with pools” and a few lines later quietly undercuts that barbed sentiment by adding, “but I just wanted you.”

The band dabbles in The Killers-style arena balladry — somewhat successfully — with the synth-driven “Giving up the Gun.” “Diplomat’s Son” samples M.I.A., Koenig uses Auto-Tune on “California English,” and the spiky ska of the single “Cousins” is rougher than anything Vampire Weekend has attempted before.

Still, if I were to quantify how wild this album gets, it’s about the equivalent of having one drink too many while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard.

And that’s just fine. “Contra” is a warm, empathetic album full of perfectly lovely pop songs dotted with a variety of influences but filtered through a very specific point-of-view — namely, that of a person who might be interested in the semiotics of preppy clothes. I guess you could hate the album, but I doubt it’s the music’s fault.



Address correspondence to Jeremiah Tucker, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802.

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