Rebirth: An Alternate Wayniverse
When recapping Lil Wayne’s road to superstardom, It’s tempting to end by saying something like “... and then, in 2010, he threw it all away by making Rebirth”. However, after spending several weeks doing a deep-dive into the rapper’s truly strange rock album, I don’t believe he was “throwing anything away” when he pivoted away from a more traditional hip-hop sound. For him, Rebirth was simply yet another leap towards whatever was catching his attention at the time. Said differently: Wayne’s whole career is built on throwaways; his throwaways are just worth more than most rappers’ whole careers.
Revisiting Rebirth validated all of the reasons I wanted to make The Skip Button. It was a critical and commercial flop that seemed to confuse and anger far more people than it inspired. In true pop-punk fashion, the album’s main pull is the charisma of its lead, but even Wayne’s magnetism couldn’t distract critics and fans alike from the fact that no one in the studio quite seemed to know how to make a rock album. Yet, listening to it in 2020, I was overwhelmed by the fact that this album came out almost a decade before artists like Juice WRLD and Lil Peep made “emo-rap'' one of the music industry’s trendiest phrases. It was difficult, then, not to think that there was some sort of prophetic genius to this album that I had overlooked when it first came out.
The “Aha Moment” for me was re-listening to “Knockout”, the Nicki Minaj-featuring second single. What starts off as a generic-sounding pop-punk record quickly comes into sharp focus when Lil Wayne shouts the question: “HEY BARBIE, ARE YOU INTO BLACK MEN?” The levels of contrast these opening moments provide gave me the kind of whiplash that I imagine many people crave from their rock & roll. It came from the fact that Wayne, as my friend Matt put it, was “centering his blackness in this otherwise cosplay of emo-rock. That’s brilliant.”
He’s right. That is brilliant. But at a time where many people (myself very much included) still treated blackness like a binary, no one quite knew what to make of Wayne’s new aesthetic. As Shanell puts it, it was too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids.
Getting a DM from Shanell saying she would be happy to speak with me may forever be one of the best ways I’ll start my day. Shanell is a Young Money Artist prominently featured throughout Rebirth. At the risk of diminishing an entire career, I couldn’t believe I was going to talk to somebody that was on We Are Young Money (the best label compilation album of all time. Fight me.).
I was surprised by how relieved I was when Shanell proclaimed early on in our conversation: “This is a dope-ass project!” I realized how disappointed I would have been if she had said anything else. Even as she stood by the project, she was able to poke some fun at Wayne for not knowing who Korn was when they showed up on the set of “Prom Queen”, as well as his pedigree as a guitarist (listening to her tell the story about how Wayne held the set of “Leather So Soft” hostage so that he could play a real guitar was one of the highlights of my year).
What devastated me was Shanell’s implication that the album’s reception - coupled with Wayne’s incarceration shortly after its release - convinced him to put the guitar away and stay in his lane. I’m not saying I wish we had four more Rebirth albums, but if it is true that public opinion had Wayne thinking he made a mistake, then I think we owe him an apology. Because, even as I struggle to name a single song on Rebirth that I would recommend, I firmly believe there is something deeply good about this album.
In this episode, I talked to Drew Landry, a writer and comedian who wrote the piece “Imagining an Alternate Universe Where Lil Wayne's Rock Album 'Rebirth' Was a Classic”. One of the reasons I was drawn to this piece is because, more than any other alternate universe, I truly believe this one exists. I am convinced that if just one element was shifted - a different set of producers, a different year, a different marketing strategy - this album would be considered a classic, a bellwether of where hip-hop was headed. Instead, I can take solace in what producer Eddie Montilla - who produced a number of songs on Rebirth - asserted about the album’s legacy: “There’s somebody out there that loves that album more than any album that’s ever been.”
If that’s true, then maybe Landry’s alternate universe isn’t too far away.
