While NYC residents are relieved to have been spared the worst of Hurricane Irene (we’re thinking of you, Vermont), I must admit to shallow disappointment in her pulling a robbery on my social life this weekend. Forced to stay indoors, I was able to spend some time with Lil Wayne’s recently-leaked Tha Carter IV while suffering through meteorologists and weather anchors overusing words like “hunker [down]” and “pounding [wind and rain],” wanting to throw a thesaurus at my television. After closing the MTV VMAs last night, the New Orleans native, who is unfortunately all too familiar with hurricanes, officially dropped his ninth solo album digitally before running off to host an after-party that coincided with Tha Carter IV’s release.

Because it’s dropping in such close proximity to Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch The Throne, Tha Carter IV is a an easy target for direct comparisons. Wayne is a one-man show, and despite having a bushel of features (from the likes of Andre 3000, Nas, Bun B, and Bob Rick Ross), facing off against Jay and Kanye’s well-marketed collaboration LP certainly isn’t apples to apples, but the pot will inevitably be stirred! One of the songs on Tha Carter IV contains a verse directed at Jay-Z and talks about kidnapping newly pregnant Beyoncé, so speculations were high that some sort of altercation would occur at the VMAs last night. Likely retaliation for Hov’s “baby money” verse on “H.A.M.” back in January, Wayne’s verse on the C4 track, entitled “It’s Good” (also featuring Jadakiss and Drake), sounds like it’s just come to term; the passion in Wayne’s voice and use of verbs in the present tense suggest it was recorded many months ago, not recently. That, mixed with the fact that Jay didn’t respond publicly last night, might mean it’s water under the bridge.
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Lil Wayne quietly premiered a video for “How To Love” this week, but its subject matter is such a doozy that everyone’s talking about it anyway. The lyrical lament about a girl who never learned how to love has become a message video about a stripper who contracts HIV, but who could have gone to college instead. The maudlin storyline recalls TLC‘s message videos, by way of Metallica‘s “Turn the Page,” and it certainly has its problematic aspects (most of which are succinctly addressed in a Sound of the City piece written by a stripper). For many, though, its melodrama is emotionally affecting despite its politics.

In essence, this song is Lil Wayne’s version of John Mayer‘s “Daughters.” This is not inherently a criticism; Mayer gets a bad rap, partly because of the extent to which the audience to whom he appeals is uncool (and, admittedly, partly because he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut). The rap ballad has always gotten a bad rap, even as its exemplars have often been rappers’ best-performing songs. Even the anti-rap-ballad screed Jeff Weiss penned for The Hollywood Reporter in response to “How To Love” admits that rap ballads perform extremely well on radio and in the market. To the extent that it’s about purity of rap, his argument is not dissimilar to hair-metal fans’ distaste for those bands’ seemingly pandering ballads.

One thing’s for sure: “How To Love” is an extremely divisive video. See for yourself above and let us know what you think in the comments.
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Lil Wayne announced this morning that his forthcoming album Tha Carter IV, scheduled to be released in stores on Monday, August 29, would be available for digital purchase in advance—specifically, at midnight ET after the Video Music Awards air (at 8pm on Sunday, August 28). But wait, you say. Don’t albums tend to premiere digitally around midnight the night before their physical release?

That’s very incisive of you—but this press release isn’t merely a rebranding of an existing fact. The pullquotes provide the clues. Cash Money Records CEO Ronald “Slim” Williams, talks about “pairing the release of Tha Carter IV with the VMAs,” and this pairing seems to have been the plan for some time now. Lil Wayne announced the album’s release date in an MTV News interview last month, after the Video Music Awards had already been scheduled.

Furthermore, MTV President Stephen Friedman says that the digital release allows VMA viewers to “go online at midnight and download the album they’ve all been waiting for.” The similarity of this attempt to digitally recreate the experience of lining up outside a record store to that of Watch The Throne two weeks ago is probably not coincidental. Even still, both Lil Wayne and The Throne are not necessarily aiming to improve their sales with these tactics; rather, they hope to recreate the big-tent release-date excitement of old (albeit not that old; for the most part the day-of iconic big releases—like Use Your Illusion I and II, twenty years old next month—were part of a marketing plan that did not really exist en masse prior to the CD era).

All in all, this is a canny move by the rapper. Anecdotal evidence suggests that viewers of television shows (particularly those on HBO and other premium cable channels) will wait impatiently for a download to become available for purchase (or, erm, “free”) if they don’t get the channel or miss the airing. Why not replicate that for music? Of course, this is another adaptation to the digital world that may only be effective for the biggest artists, but if it catches on, it’ll be an interesting one nonetheless.