The seductive allure of Lil Wayne's Hot Revolver

Do you have the time to listen to him whine?

I am highly skeptical about Lil Wayne's Rebirth, his upcoming album of guitar-driven rock. As a huge Weezy fan who actively downloads his every new mixtape to get another glimpse of his wordplay, I've been alienated lately by the Kanye-ification of his recent singles, where singing cliches through Autotune like a bad high school garage band substitutes for all that was original and brilliant about their respective rap outputs.

I hated "Prom Queen," the first official single signaling Weezy F. Baby's "new direction." So it was with trepidation that I downloaded "Hot Revolver," his second rock single, in which he absolutely wallows in the genre's conventions like a pig in shit, to the point of appropriating a singalong line off Green Day's Dookie. But you know what? It ain't half bad.

 

00:10: The aforementioned Dookie line: "Do you have the time to listen to me whine?" But it's never been rhymed with "you diss me every time."

00:55: I keep expecting the next line to be, "I think we're alone now."

00:57: Instead, it's his signature "Young Moolah baby!" And it was in this that I saw the seeds of Rebirth. It was there all along, I just never noticed.

1:42: "Boy you got a problem/and you ain't foolin' no one but yourself!/You're like a hot revolver/and you ain't killin' nobody but yourself!" Oh ... that's why it's called "Hot Revolver" ... I still don't get it.

2:03 Classic Lil Wayne free association wordplay. This is what makes him such an amazing mixtape rapper. Makes me wish that's what he was doing.

2:44: CHORUS! Crazy that Weezy is making rock circa 1983. This reminds me something I'd hear on Jock Jams.

Overall, I rate this ***, which is actually better than I rated several songs on the instant classic, Carter III.

So: Good show, Weezy. Now please, can a brotha get a mixtape without guitar?