Lil Wayne - Funeral

Lil Wayne's Funeral. His first move since his pretty admirable, but slightly bloated back to form C5. But still, I couldn't help but stay skeptical about this one. 24 tracks? Lil Baby? Big Sean? The tracklist isn't the best looking.

Thr first track sets the tone, pretty much similar to what you would expect from an album called Funeral: pretty majestic and haunting. Many tracks carry that tone actually. The intro track would've been much better if Wayne's unenthusiastic singing didn't go on forever. The rapping isa cool though.
Mahogany has a simple beat, leaving space for Wayne to dabble with words lile he always does, and he does it kinda well. Kinda like Dedicate from C5 in terms of wordplay, slightly less impactful but up to this point, not as good a start as C5.

However, the next track is painfully mediocre. The beat annoys me to death, too annoying to be carried or covered by anyone. Should be on the cutting room floor. If anything, this indicates that the next 21 songs will surely have a lot of fat, if such a garbage song shows up this early. The next track is better, only marginally. Big Sean and Lil Baby on it are as mediocre as always. Dreams is one of the more introspective cuts on Funeral, that strongly carry the tone of Funeral. His voice inflection and freak out on the hook is kinda enjoyable. Weird, but a guilty pleasure. Clap For Em is a twerk anthem produced fairly well, but kinda loses value due to Wayne's unconvincing performance. Another one of many unconvincing performance on the album.

9 tracks into my listen, it ain't IANAHB levels of terrible, but in contrast to C5, I was already beginning to get tired from this. Trust Nobody is a change of pace from all the trap bangers, and a great one. This guitar-driven track has a catchy hook and sound slick and on point. 2 Chainz continues his streak of weak features on Know You Know, and the track with Takeoff is pretty nice, even if the feature sounds lost on his verse, further proof that Migos serves supremely as a unit, I guess lol.

After that, a gigantic wave of filler comes in for like all the way until the XXXTENTACION song, in which he handles another one of his Take a Step Back hook, super energetic, unfortunately the only redeeming quality to the song, as Wayne sounds at this point as jaded as I am right now. And there's still 6 more tracks.

I thought Piano Trap would be a cool trap banger amd something refreshing given the title of the song, but falls flat as it's a contender for the most generic song on all of the project. The vocal sample on Line Em Up is as off the mark as Nas's Cops Shot the Kid. The rest isn't all different from everything we've went through so far, Never Mind is a high point on this final legs, but doesn't say a lot since the bar isn't high at all.

Lyric-wise, we all know Wayne doesn't need to have a super deep or thoughtful topic to spit bars and dabble with words, but he sounds too unenthusiastic to even do that. C5 was long, very long, yes. It also sounds dated at points because it's old, I agree. But what made it so good is that Wayne's sounded hungry and vivid for wordplay and that made him bring his A-game. It seemed like he cared about it. This is just a cash grab. Not awful by any means, but out of 24 tracks, only like 5 are actually enjoyable, while the rest is filler that Wayne didn't put effort to make, not one of these go toe to toe with songs like Dedicate or the song with Swizz Beatz, or with Kendrick. And at the end I don't this album deserves the title and tone and aesthetic it has. So yeah, Wayne did done a lil goof on this one.