Lil Wayne Funeral Review

Wayne is the reason to listen, and his rapping is the best thing on the record by a wide margin. The flow is rubbery and unpredictable, bending syllables around the beat, landing a joke on the off-beat and then switching cadence mid-verse. The wordplay is still dense, the punchlines still arrive in clusters, and the delivery has that sly, slightly amused tone that made him dangerous on mixtapes. The Pitchfork critic's remark that his rapping hides direct revelations under lightning ferocity is a good guide to how the better verses work.

The writing has a split personality. When Wayne focuses, as on the songs about family, abandonment and the ghosts of his own career, he lands images with a bluntness that cuts through the punchline machinery. When he does not, the lines are simply busy: one clever turn after another with no center. The album's emotional high point, Rolling Stone's praise for the parental-neglect song, comes from a rare moment of focus, and the contrast with the rest only shows how often he settles for cleverness.

Production is the record's structural problem. The credits list a staggering number of beatmakers, from Mannie Fresh and Mike Will Made It to Cool & Dre, Murda Beatz and a long line of lesser-known names, usually in teams of two and three. The result is a record with no sonic identity. Trap drums, minor-key keyboards and hi-hat rolls repeat from beat to beat, and the hooks come from whoever happened to be in the room. A New Orleans rapper working with a producer like Fresh sounds like himself; surrounded by this many hands, he sounds like a guest on a playlist.

The best beats are the ones with a clear idea. The title track's strings and guitar give it a gravity the rest of the record cannot match, and the Fresh reunion songs bring back the knocking, spacious drums that made Wayne's early work distinctive. Samples help: a few songs use older material to give the drums a texture that stock trap lacks. Those are exactly the moments where a human hand shows through the template.

The weaker material shows up in the guest slots and hooks. The pop-leaning hook on one of the songs was widely singled out as the worst thing on the record, and a late ballad feature drew a similar reaction, with the critic suggesting it should have been given to a different singer. These are not fatal errors, but they interrupt the rapping, and the rapping is the point.

On originality, the record is a veteran's refresh rather than a reinvention. Wayne tells Vibe that he wanted to fit in with what is going on today, and the beats reflect that effort. The cost is that few songs could only have come from him.

The album peaks early and then spends most of its runtime trying to recover. The opening stretch is strong: a dark, string-lined title song sets a reckoning mood, and Mahogany, which Rolling Stone called the album's peak, follows with a bounce that feels like old Wayne. Rolling Stone was right that the record never quite gets back there, but the run of songs that follows is lively and varied enough to keep the energy up for several tracks.

The middle is where the album loses control. Features arrive at predictable intervals, producers change every few minutes, and the tempo settles into a mid-speed trap pocket that stretches for a dozen songs. Consequence of Sound said the record becomes exhausting about halfway through, and that is accurate: there is no sequencing logic holding it together, and a listener who drifts away has no reason to drift back.

The late stretch recovers somewhat. Wayne rediscovers some of his hunger, the beats gain a bit of grit, and a few of the later songs come close to the early highs. The closing tracks, though, trail off rather than land, and the silence that honors Kobe Bryant at the end of Bing James is more resonant than anything the final run delivers.

At twenty-four tracks and more than seventy minutes, the length is not earned. A rapper this fluent and this prolific benefits from an editor, and the critics who noticed that Wayne is not a great editor were right. If you cut it to fourteen songs, you would have a very good album, and the cut would be easy to make.

Funeral lands well below the two Carter albums, which the site scores at 7.6 and 7.9, and well above Rebirth at 3.8. That placement is deliberate: Wayne's rapping here is closer to his best than the scores of the middle suggest, but the record around him is too diffuse to rival Tha Carter II, where a single idea of sound and ambition held the verses together. Funeral is a collection, and Robert Christgau, a fan of it, said as much.

The right audience is anyone who loves Wayne's rapping and wants proof that he can still do it, along with fans of Southern trap who will enjoy hearing a legend work with a new generation of beatmakers. People who want a cohesive album, a strong concept or consistent hooks should skip the full run and take a playlist instead. If you came for punchlines and flow, you will find them; if you came for a statement, you will not.

It has aged as a lesser entry in the catalog: a record with pockets of excellence that rarely gets played from front to back. Its best moments hold up, and its worst date quickly, particularly the guest-driven songs built for the playlists of the moment.

Start with the title track, then Mahogany, then Bastard (Satan’s Kid), which several critics treated as the emotional center of the album. Add Clap for Em for pure rapping fun. For what a complete Wayne album sounds like, go to Tha Carter III, and for a younger rapper working the same long-playlist format, try Lil Baby.

Funeral is a great rapper's good mixtape, released as a bloated album, and the fourteen songs worth keeping are easy to find.