Lil Wayne - No Ceilings 2 (2015)
I don't consider myself to be a Lil Wayne stan by any means, but I like him a lot and look out for the good in his discography, no matter how many times people tell me he's garbage, that he's gone to shit, whatever. I liked "Tha Carter IV", "Sorry 4 the Wait 2", hell, even "Free Weezy Album", the point I'm trying to make is that Lil Wayne never fell off FOR ME when people said he did, for the most part. Sure, "I Am Not a Human Being II" had some trash, but what the fuck, dude, this mixtape is something different entirely. I was not the hugest fan of the original mixtape, because while the first half is fucking great, the second half is garbage, but you know what this mixtape has in comparison to the first tape? IT'S ALL GARBAGE! That's right: You don't even have to wait for the second half for the garbage to kick in, it starts IMMEDIATELY when someone yells "NO CEILINGS BISEXUAL! THAT MEANS TWO!" in the first track, and then the garbage never fucking stops, it's like the garbageman has a vendetta against you and just dumps the entire fucking load in your front lawn for over an hour and a fucking half, 24 tracks.
Lil Wayne is autotuned to fuck, which doesn't normally bother me, but he sounds like he doesn't give a fuck about anything: He's mumbling nearly all of his verses and generally sounds like he's stuck between wanting to sleep and wanting to sound like Young Thug, but that's not even the worst part: A lot of the beats he goes over on this mixtape sound like (maybe because they are?) YouTube recreations of popular beats out there, for whatever fucking reason, and they're -really- poorly mixed to the point where the bass doesn't have any power, some portions of the beats are mixed louder than Wayne's rapping, etc, which especially sucks when he goes over beats that Drake made famous, because he could've just fucking asked him to throw him the original beats, given that Drake was his fucking protege, but it's not even like any of that shit can save this mixtape, because the lyrics, a thing I've never really faulted Lil Wayne before, are fucking shit. When he goes over some of these songs, it sounds like he's making a word-for-word parody of the original song, like a hip-hop Weird Al, as he talks about "I used to call you from the jail phone" in "Hotline Bling", or even more curiously, raps about sticking his thumb up a girl's ass in "The Hills", and he fails to realize that these songs don't even have hot beats, it's basically the hook that MAKES the song. People weren't on social media talking about the beats, they were fucking quoting the lyrics as the caption to their shitty Instagram selfie.
It's just.. Fuck, dude. I know Lil Wayne has to have some form of self-awareness, because I don't think in -any- state of mind that he could think that going fully autotuned over the instrumental of Eminem's classic "My Name Is" was dope, and I can't lie, almost two years after the mixtape dropped, I still actively feel disappointed, even moreso than the night that it came out. I just can't believe that the man who brought us classics before could put out something this low-quality to the point where it feels like a parody of himself. This tape just has so much shit working against it that I don't think that anyone even fucking likes this mixtape. Sure, they may have liked it the night that it dropped, but now? Not a fucking chance. This shit has a ceiling that even dwarfs have to crouch down to avoid hitting.
4/10
________________________________________________________
Feel free to check out this mixtape for FREE on DatPiff!
