Rock star lifestyle might not make it. For a while there, you were inclined to take Dwayne Michael Carter Jr at his word. The codeine addiction and lean-fueled health scares. The weapons charge and one-year stint at Rikers. The BLM missteps and clumsy alignment with Trump. The doomed lobbying for the hometown Super Bowl halftime show gig that ultimately went to Kendrick Lamar. In the decade-and-a-half since those breathless “best rapper alive” claims still carried deadly serious weight, Lil Wayne has swerved between flashes of brilliance and irrelevance, equally hard-won. His new album, Tha Carter VI, dropped on Friday at midnight and was immediately panned in comments sections as incoherent, indulgent and creatively bankrupt. Yet, hours later, there he was at Madison Square Garden, a 42-year-old household name speed-running through a career-spanning 70-minute set that felt like tumbling through a wormhole of bars, hooks and memories: dense, disorienting and occasionally exhilarating.
Wayne finally hit the stage just after 10.15pm, unfashionably late and dressed for interdimensional travel: a heavyweight Britney Spears tee, pink sweats tucked into heeled knee-high boots, white sunglasses the size of a windshield, carrying a white electric guitar he strummed at sparingly. A 24-person gospel choir in burgundy robes loomed behind him on a diagonal riser, flanked by longtime DJ T Lewis and a live drummer. It was giving the overture to a surrealist mixtape musical with the one-time child prodigy from Hollygrove presiding over a congregation of around 15,000 true believers who had forked over hundreds of dollars to pack the arena to the corners.
The show marked Wayne’s first solo headlining appearance at the Garden and the kickoff of his Tha Carter VI tour, though the rest of the 34-date North American trek won’t resume until late July. It also doubled as an album-release party for C6, which landed with a critical thud. Wayne seemed to get it. He kept the new material to a half-dozen songs, cramming more than 37 tracks into a compressed set that played like a chaotic, real-time greatest hits dump.
Early on, the crowd – which ranged from teenagers in fresh tour merch to thirtysomething mixtape heads in Fendi buckets to a small army of influencers who dotted the floor surrounded by their camera crews – buzzed with anticipation if not certainty as Wayne ran through mostly new songs. Then came the turn. An ear-splitting sample of Harry Belafonte’s Day-O shattered the room, giving way to Carter IV smash 6 Foot 7 Foot, with Bronx rapper and former Young Money label-mate Cory Gunz taking the stage to tear through his feature like it was still 2011. From there, a dizzying medley of guest verses followed – Chris Brown’s Loyal, French Montana’s Pop That, Drake’s HYFR and The Motto – a victory lap through the feature hall of fame. Another roaring pop came when LL Cool J materialized from stage left for Rock the Bells, his 1985 classic that Wayne samples liberally from on Carter VI’s Bells.
Wayne barely paused between tracks, only to take long pulls from a slow-burning blunt or one of the boxes of water neatly arranged on a folding table in the wings. There was conspicuously little in the way of stage production, only the glowing angled riser with Roman numerals, a spartan lighting rig and the requisite bursts of smoke and pyro. If most arena rap shows follow a somewhat formal structure to allow for set changes and dramatic pacing, Wayne’s felt like a corrupted Zip file of his legacy: fast, raw, jittery and relentless. Rather than guide fans through his catalogue, he threw it at them like a flash-bang. Songs flickered past in seconds, verses collapsed into hooks and whole eras vanished in a blur. The spectacle was in the music itself with Wayne bending time, sequencing and momentum into a constantly shifting loop, though the value proposition of such an abridged performance (with no opening act) is bound to test all but the most devoted Weezy cultists.
Once the baby-faced, froggy-voiced New Orleans savant who burst into national prominence with the Hot Boys, Wayne has always traded on an authentic volatility. From his mid-aughts mixtape blitz (Dedication 2, Da Drought 3, No Ceilings) to the Grammy-conquering apotheosis of Tha Carter III, his best work was never about polish, rather an uncontainable marriage of force and sheer volume that hasn’t quite been matched in popular music since. (The highest highs of Friday’s gig reached back to that precipitous peak, most notably crowd-pleasing fragments from Tha Carter III favorites Let the Beat Build, Lollipop and Mrs Officer.) That energy faded. In 2010, he dropped the rock-rap misfire Rebirth, then went to Rikers. The post-prison catalogue has been uneven and Tha Carter VI does nothing to buck that trend. But Wayne live – even when unrepentantly tardy and careening through abbreviated versions of songs – still delivers jolts of charisma through his formidable wordplay and flow, especially when he leans into the loose, strange brilliance that once made him one of the most compelling artists on the planet.
The night closed with A Milli, Wayne’s most inscrutable radio hit. Released at the height of his powers, it remains one of the weirdest songs ever to crash the top 10 or win a Grammy: no chorus, no hook, just verses unspooling over a lurching, hypnotic four-minute loop. Sixteen years on, it still feels like a transmission from another planet, offering up a closing note so perfect that any hopes of an encore are quickly put aside. Tha Carter VI may be profoundly skippable. And this tour may not deliver value for money to the casual punter. With its frantic pacing, abrupt transitions and grab-bag setlist, it often lands as more head-spinning than electrifying. But even if Wayne’s declarations of global supremacy are years past their sell-by date, there’s still something undeniable about watching him step through a portal to his prime and swagger through it, the tattoos on his face a roadmap of battles won and indulgences survived.
