It’s hard to become a healthy, functional, stable adult if you didn’t have anything resembling a childhood or adolescence. That’s doubly true if your childhood was sacrificed on the altar of celebrity and fame. Child stars are often doomed to spend their adult lives trying to recapture everything they missed because they were just too famous, rich, and busy to enjoy all the soul-wrenching bullshit civilians go through in making the perilous transition from childhood to adulthood.
So perhaps Rebirth, Lil Wayne’s ill-fated, much-delayed, commercially underwhelming, critically reviled 2010 “rock” album can best be understood as a successful man’s attempts to experience via music the adolescence he missed while recording iconic songs and releasing platinum albums while luckier kids were busy making out with Suzy Homecoming Queen in the back seat of her daddy’s Camaro, or drinking Thunderbird with their burnout buddies under the bleachers at football games. Lil Wayne had just turned 15 when Cash Money Records released Get It While It’s Hot, the blockbuster debut of the baby-faced gangsta-rap quartet Hot Boys. The group was essentially the hip-hop equivalent of a Lou Pearlman boy band, only with more tattoo tears and longer rap sheets. It had a ragingly homoerotic name equally suited to a Chippendale’s competitor (“All the way from New Orleans come the Hot Boys! So ladies, get out your singles, ’cause these sexy young men came to mingle!”), a propensity for shirtlessness, NAMBLA-baiting monikers referencing their youth (Lil Wayne, Young Turk, B.G (for Baby Gangsta), Juvenile), and a creepy, beefy mentor/father figure (Brian Williams, a.k.a. Baby, a.k.a. Birdman) Wayne was once publicly photographed kissing on the mouth.
Wayne had just turned 15 when the Hot Boys released their first album (1997’s Get It How U Live!), 16 when he helped popularize the phrase “bling bling” by providing the chorus to the B.G. song of the same name, and 17 when he released his solo debut, Tha Block Is Hot. Wayne dropped out of a magnet school at 14 to embrace his destiny as a rap star, a fateful decision that catapulted him directly from childhood to adulthood without those messy but crucial in-between stages. In that respect, Rebirth is less an album that had to be made or a musical revolution snuffed in its infancy than a rap-star indulgence and a crucial but clunky step in Wayne’s tumultuous musical and emotional evolution. Wayne had to live out his juvenile rock-star fantasies so he could go back to being a rap star. It’s an alternately endearingly and bratty act of willful regression to the bad old days of adolescence, the musical and professional equivalent of scrawling an anarchy symbol on the back of a jean jacket, learning a few basic chords on a cheap electric guitar, and writing terrible poetry about the tyranny of government oppression and/or cute girls who won’t go out with you.
If adolescence is all about making stupid mistakes and terrible decisions as you scramble to figure yourself out amid a hurricane of surging hormones and trembling anxiety, then Rebirth is one of the most adolescent albums ever made. Most of us are lucky enough to suffer through the hardships and humiliations of adolescence in private, but Rebirth represents a profoundly public embarrassment. The album opens with the sound of a guitarist and drummer warming up. Then Wayne kicks things off with a rock-star “Whoa.” It’s supposed to be a stirring statement of purpose: “We’ve got guitars, motherfuckers, and we know how to use them.” Instead, it establishes an all-too-fitting tone of clumsy, overprocessed amateurism and unconvincing role-playing.
The project’s boneheaded obviousness is reflected in the kick-off track’s title: “American Star.” That’s like sticking a pair of shades on someone to convey their coolness. How fucking cheesy would that be? Oh wait, that isn’t just a groan-inducing dinosaur-rock cliché, that’s also Rebirth’s album cover, which showcases its star splayed out on a gold couch with a phallic electric guitar draped over his lap and cool-dude sunglasses on his face. As if all that weren’t excessive enough in a rock-star-iconography-for-beginners sort of way, Wayne even sports a scarf seemingly purloined from the collections of Steven Tyler and Stevie Nicks. (There’s a lot of overlap between their closets.)
I admire the label’s restraint in not putting Lil Wayne in a Hard Rock Hotel New Orleans T-shirt or dropping a vintage David Lee Roth-era Van Halen poster in the background to convey that, in spite of his previous involvement with the hippety-hop music, now Wayne really knows how to rock out. Did I mention he’s wearing shades? Only cool dudes do rock-star shit like that.
On the Rebirth cover, the electric guitar, scarf, and sunglasses come across as woefully unconvincing props desperately trying to signify rock ’n’ roll. Putting a guitar in Wayne’s hands (or lap) doesn’t instantly transform him into a contemporary Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen. It’s more like creative Kryptonite that transforms a megastar at the top of his game into a rank amateur fucking around on an instrument he barely knows how to play, and dabbling in a genre he clearly has enormous affection for, but doesn’t really understand. Lil Wayne was a rock star of hip-hop before he ever picked up an electric guitar. He has rock-star swagger, cockiness, and bravado. As Rebirth attests, he also has rock-star ambition, grandiosity, and perhaps more than anything, eccentricity.
By the time Rebirth was released to vitriolic reviews and tepid sales, Wayne had ascended to such giddy professional heights that Jay-Z had already anointed Wayne his heir via their Tha Carter III collaboration “Mr. Carter.” And Jay-Z has never been effusive in his praise of anyone but himself and Memphis Bleek. (Kanye West’s entire career can be read as one long attempt to get his professional father figure to finally break down and tell him what a special young man he’s become.) So it wasn’t exactly a big promotion to go from world-conquering rap megastar to beginning guitar player and Auto-Tune-assisted aspiring rock belter.