I Am Not a Human Being II… Nope, this one isn’t a return to form either

Review: Lil Wayne – I Am Not a Human Being II

Published on April 1st, 2013 | Jonny Abrams

Now on his fourth successive album’s worth of predominantly toss, it’s getting safer and safer to assume that we’re not going to hear the likes of Tha Carter III from Lil Wayne again. An interminable procession of lyrical ‘quips’ involving his member (er, again), I Am Not a Human Being II makes it quite clear where his priorities lie now: that is, selling millions of records over making good records.

That characteristically jarring Auto-Tune continues to rear its grotesquely ugly head at all-too-frequent intervals, while on closing track “Hello” (arf!) we are ‘treated’ to a reprise of the utterly abhorrent rock-rap hybrid that stunk out 2010 album Rebirth worse than a tuna sandwich left in a school locker over the summer holidays. That’s probably pretty stinky.

I Am Not a Human Being II is regularly punctuated by the sound of a joint being toked, and if that’s Lil Wayne’s way of trying to muster inspiration then he either a) is Towelie from South Park or b) needs to find a new dealer. Funnily enough, the album begins promisingly with tempestuous waves of classical piano (presumably not Lil Wayne playing it) but this trick doesn’t work anywhere near as effectively as it did on Nas’s Life is Good album of last year, simply by dint of its cuing up the lines “I’m in the crib butt-naked / She said my dick could be the next black president / Americans hate that I’m American / Medicine, I treat it like peppermints”.

See, that last line would appear to be referring to the codeine addiction that may or may not have been the cause of his recent seizures, which carries weight and would have made more of an impact were it not surrounded by such total guff.

“Last night I had a dream that my dick turned to Megatron”…“Drive me like a Go-Kart / I play it like Mozart”…“”She ride me like a drive-by”“…we get it, for crying out loud. Even the relatively serious-seeming lines invite derision (“I wear my heart on my sleeve, so don’t be breaking my arm”…“See me walking with a limp, that’s my gunwalk”). Musically, the album is perhaps best summed up by “Days and Days”, which deploys jittery plastic snare hits that remind of “Speakerboxxx” yet manage to be conducive to a track that’s about one squillionth as good as said Big Boi number.

The only saving grace is bonus track “Lay It Down”, or more accurately its strange, tooting, old-school computer game production. It’s the kind of lateral thinking that once made Lil Wayne so great – alas, he is now either unable or unwilling to call upon it. Maybe it’s time to hit the ‘ignore’ button.

Rocksucker says: One Quail out of Five!

I Am Not a Human Being II is out now on Universal/Island. For more information, please visit Lil Wayne’s official website.

Artists: lil wayne

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.