Five years ago, Lil Wayne released The Carter III – at the time, his crowning achievement. The culmination of a decade-long ascent from the streets of New Orleans to pop stardom, it sold over a million copies in its first week. Around the same time, his frequent pronouncement that he was “the best rapper alive” ceased to be a boast and instead became a clear statement of fact. His slow, lusty single ‘Lollipop’ played the whole US summer, the first of two chart toppers for producer Jim Jonsin, who also helmed T.I.’s smash ‘Whatever You Like’. The pair had the world at their feet – in any other genre a long slow burn at the top would have been assured on the back of their initial success.
Unfortunately for them, great hip hop is a terminator crop, hardwiring the seeds of its creative destruction into its DNA.
In 2013, Wayne is a long way from his glorious peak, having released a much-ridiculed ‘rock’ album and string of patchy albums, sequels and mixtapes. Lately he’s been making the news chiefly for his ongoing seizures and a six-day hospital stay. He has a current hit single which feels like a charity record, thanks to the heavy lifting being done by Atlanta singer/rapper Future and his former protégé Drake – just two of the dozens of rappers who have eclipsed Wayne over the past few years. The one-time infallible producer Jonsin, meanwhile, hasn’t had a Billboard top ten hit since 2010. Each now looks washed up.
They are hardly unique in having soared then fallen. Most of the biggest rappers of the past decade are shadows of their former selves, with nothing like the cultural cachet they once possessed. Rehab (Eminem), indefinite hiatus (Outkast), jail (T.I.), or borderline insanity (DMX) beckoned them from their perch. I would argue, though, that it wasn’t just a run of bad luck. It was an inability to cope with the moment having passed, and how fleeting it always is in hip hop.
