I basically don’t have it in me to talk about this whole album, so let me focus on just one track for a second:

13 - Nothin’ On Me (featuring Fabolous and Juelz Santana)

Fab - whatever. JUELZ* turns in an ISO 9000 certified BURNER, I think - “You’re sloppy like seconds / obey me like peasants / or get opened up like presents” and then later “I’m a shark / y’all just koi fish / what else / octopus / what else / oysters.” With his cleverness and clear delivery he sounds to me like an orthodox inheritor of Jadakiss - the pinnacle of mixtape rap in the year 2000, and I mean that as a compliment. So then, after a noodling autotune chorus, Wayne staggers in with a good line (”It’s Weezy / F you - now you gotta have a baby”) and proceeds to - freestyle, I guess, for a minute and ten seconds. For someone who seems obsessed with sports references and competition (elsewhere: “even the referee / thinks I need an Espy”) Wayne seems uninterested in one-upping Santana. His portion of the song is flawed, deeply flawed, not what you’d expect to make it onto a highly anticipated album that was supposed to become a classic or reinvigorate hip-hop or whatever. Wayne is fucking around, and it’s that exposed roughness that makes you either love or despise him. His great commonality with Jay-Z (track two; Jay seems to be making fun of him) is their relaxed sprechstimme style of delivery and at the end of the song when he turns the autotune back on and slows down, gangster-whispering “I got everything / you got nothing / you ain’t got nothing on me” he sounds like - my turn to free-associate - an inverted Tracy Chapman. Soo woo, damu.

* “Santana was arrested outside of his Teaneck, New Jersey home in March 2008. After being pulled over for driving with a suspended license, a search by police of Santana’s Bentley found a bag of marijuana, 29 hollow-point bullets and $19,500 in cash inside a plastic bag filled with Jolly Rancher candies.”