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“I Feel Good” isn’t exactly typical of FWA’s sound, even though Wayne evidently would have a ton of fun putting together a bunch of James Brown tributes. “I Feel Good”, a James Brown impersonation even more blatant than Mark Ronson and Mystikal’s “Feel Right”, should sound unoriginal for recycling such a widely sampled classic, but his joyous energy atop those horns is a welcome indication that he still gets a charge out of the physical, performative aspect of rapping. There are even occasions when he sounds thrilled to be doing so. There’s no guest rapper of major consequence until a jet-setting, wife-stealing Wiz Khalifa shows up on the album’s third-to-last song, “Living Right”, but Wayne can fend for himself most of the time. Unlike his mixtape material, he’s not retreading formulas by relying on established beats or verse structures. The answers were up in the air until as recently as the Fourth of July, when Wayne released FWA as a TIDAL exclusive. FWA, then, addresses some big questions: What does Lil Wayne sound like in 2015? Should he be making radio hits or sketching experimental new sounds for others to follow? Shouldn’t he be able to do both simultaneously? This was especially true when it started looking like we’ll never hear Tha Carter V. Wayne wouldn’t be Wayne if not for his impeccable remixes on tapes like Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3, but after hearing him rap over the likes of “CoCo”, “Hot Nigga”, and “Try Me” on Sorry 4 the Wait 2back in January, fans started getting eager to hear what Wayne thought he should sound like as a rapper and a selector of fresh instrumentals. So, while the Free Weezy Album is technically his third project to come out since his 2013 album I Am Not a Human Being II, it’s his first collection of original songs since then. With its unfortunate link to a much-talked-about business venture, FWA, like his coworker’s Magna Carta…Holy Grail, is as much advertisement as art, and at worst it suggests there’s a valid creative reason why Tha Carter V has been kept in the vault.For better or worse, Lil Wayne still views the mixtape format as a place for him to rap over rented beats. To its credit, FWA is slicker than most mixtapes - and on tracks like the opener, his flow remains a spectacle - but there’s also the pervading sense here that he’s playing it safe. That incarnation of Wayne seems long gone. It’s not a fully formed album, but neither does it resurrect the fabled Best Rapper Alive who lit up the mid-2000s DatPiff market with his Drought and Dedication serials. In this light, its lasting impression is less as a cogent full-length than as a marketing device - or something to tweet about. Officially, FWA has been released through the Tidal streaming music service, of which Weezy is now a co-owner. The unsatisfying sequencing and an abundance of sappy hooks (bye, Jake Troth) plagues FWA throughout, like when the relationship rap of “Psycho” segues uneasily into the eerie, Junior Reid-aided “Murda.” Listening to FWA start-to-finish is a bemusing experience as the mood shifts erratically, casting it as a badly formatted playlist. The perky “I Feel Good” samples the James Brown song of the same name and suggests a celebration, but is followed incongruently by the introspective “My Heart Races On,” which finds Wayne touching on police brutality (“They already killed enough of us”). What ensues instead is an uneven grab bag that quickly goes awry and fails to cohere.
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“Rest in peace to the Cash Money Weezy / Gone but not forgotten,” he Auto-Croons on the latter track, teasing that he’s about to launch into a creative rebirth.
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The 15-track collection begins brightly and on-point: Opener “Glory,” and its melodramatic follow-up, “He’s Dead,” set a resolute tone as they detail Lil Wayne’s newfound freedom.
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On the heels of its similarly uneven 2015 companion, Sorry 4 the Wait 2, this more promising and (comparatively) fired-up Tidal exclusive still dwindles into a tepid zone and potentially puts to death the myth of Mixtape Weezy. But despite a provocative title that suggests he’s hitting back at his former allies, FWA - or Free Weezy Album - isn’t so much a statement of independence as Just Another Mixtape. Lil Wayne’s whopping $51 million lawsuit against the label is the latest case of revolt, this time with Weezy likening himself to a prisoner and claiming his long-delayed Tha Carter V album is being held back from release. Cash Money is an army - but Baby and Slim’s New Orleans venture has always been afflicted by disgruntled soldiers, going back to early-‘90s acts like UNLV, members of the Hot Boys, and even their in-house producer, Mannie Fresh.