Instead, he unearths gems like, “Let me rub this dick against that matchbox,” which is painful on every conceivable level. On Fire takes a single metaphor (“She’s on fire!”) and riffs on that conceit more or less throughout, taking none of his characteristically colorful flights and tangents. Of course, we’re talking about Lil’ “Get money, fuck bitches” Wayne, here, but the humorlessness and blandness of it are what ultimately kill Rebirth. The fact that Weezy’s new sound seems to borrow from so many girl bands makes the blatant sexism of the lyrics even more ridiculous. Add the omnipresent, completely flat power chords and the occasional hip-hop beats, and we get something akin to a Martian's conception of arena metal, which may actually have been the point in the first place. Paradice (yes, that’s how he spells it) borrows 3 Doors Down’s guitar arpeggios Knockout inexplicably rips off Kelly Clarkson (who ripped off Avril Lavigne) and – on Get a Life – we can almost feel No Doubt stabbing us in the eyes with mascara applicators. This transitions clumsily into the kind of mid-tempo funk that the Red Hot Chili Peppers grew tired of in the eighties. One of the most egregious offenders is the opening track, American Star, the first bars of which are like listening to some dorm room hack mash his way through Van Halen’s Eruption (though – after viewing all those You Tube videos of Weezy playing the six-string live – I don’t believe for a second that that’s actually Lil Wayne working the fret board on this song). It’s as if Wayne one morning decided to make rock music without having actually heard any before. In discussions of the riffs and instrumentation, the only real debate among critics is whether they most closely resemble bad Nickelback, bad Staind, or bad System of a Down. Now that may seem like senseless bashing, so below I describe in detail why this album – which includes exactly one good song, Drop the World, during which Weezy mercifully drops the Auto-Tune and picks up Eminem for a guest verse – deserves every bit of derision it receives. Wayne’s creation, in contrast, is terrible in such new, innovative, and revolutionary ways that it almost becomes essential listening.
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It is the album by which all other bad albums should be judged, one-uping all of P.O.D.’s discography only because the latter group’s music is so predictably lousy. Wayne has created the new Pet Sounds of bad music. Given this, the near uniformity of opinion with regard to Rebirth is cause for celebration. Even the most putrid slime has its defenders. Perusing the scores of the albums represented on Metacritic, one would think that most of the records released in the last ten years have been decidedly above average. In a weird way, Lil Wayne’s rock album is the best thing to happen to music criticism in a long time.