Lil' Wayne "Ride for My N****s"

After revelling in Drought 3 for the past week or so, I'm of the mind that Lil' Wayne is on the same level of brilliantly rampant personality contradiction as Ghostface, whose Fishscale was my favorite record of last year. As far as I'm concerned, there are no American pop stars with the sort of outsize personalities even close as interesting as Ghost and Wayne. But after Drought, Wayne just might (might) have one up on Ghost. He's a relentless, prolific, often hilarious trickster figure from a city undergoing a reconstruction process that gives this mixtape its name. He's not one to make entire concept albums about the post-Katrina war zone of New Orleans, but he'll include one-off songs about it, and this one is more than enough. "Ride for My N****s" (mp3) is less a protest song than a call-to-arms, but one directed at himself. After an ominous series of pounded piano notes, the mix gets taken over by relentless synth-gusts, dark and menacing guitars, bell-tower clangs, handclaps, and synth-created choirs, like a post-apocalyptic church service. He marches around his neighborhood like an alternate-universe mayor, using his grotesquely raspy voice as a bullhorn to echo off building walls, making promises he'll no doubt keep. Not the FEMA 1/2 acre and a trailer oath, of course; more the "Most likely I’ma die with my finger on the trigger" variety. Wayne's survival kit is equally stocked with skillets and baggies as it is canned goods, and the status quo to which he's looking to return isn't the kind you'll see on CNN. As he describes it, Wayne's world is as upside-down as a refrigerator in a tree, one in which the border between water and land gets erased: "I’m probably in the sky, flyin’ with the fishes / Or maybe in the ocean, swimmin’ with the pigeons." This sort of surreal, inverted world is the perfect sort for Wayne to take over and recreate in his own image: turning those refrigerators into bizarro-vending machines, and creating a Clipsian micro-economy that only recognizes certain citizens. "The sky is the limit"---fair enough, but where's the sky?

This track is taken from the version without Birdman and Khaled, so the "official" release (ha) will be different. This one, from what I can gather (see below), will be better.

ELSEWHERE: I'm sure you've read it, but Tom's take on Drought is the definitive one as yet.