Rock star lifestyle might not make it. For a while there, you were inclined to take Dwayne Michael Carter Jr at his word. The codeine addiction and lean-fueled health scares. The weapons charge and one-year stint at Rikers. The BLM missteps and clumsy alignment with Trump. The doomed lobbying for the hometown Super Bowl halftime show gig that ultimately went to Kendrick Lamar. In the decade-and-a-half since those breathless “best rapper alive” claims still carried deadly serious weight, Lil Wayne has swerved between flashes of brilliance and irrelevance, equally hard-won. His new album, Tha Carter VI, dropped on Friday at midnight and was immediately panned in comments sections as incoherent, indulgent and creatively bankrupt. Yet, hours later, there he was at Madison Square Garden, a 42-year-old household name speed-running through a career-spanning 70-minute set that felt like tumbling through a wormhole of bars, hooks and memories: dense, disorienting and occasionally exhilarating.
Wayne finally hit the stage just after 10.15pm, unfashionably late and dressed for interdimensional travel: a heavyweight Britney Spears tee, pink sweats tucked into heeled knee-high boots, white sunglasses the size of a windshield, carrying a white electric guitar he strummed at sparingly. A 24-person gospel choir in burgundy robes loomed behind him on a diagonal riser, flanked by longtime DJ T Lewis and a live drummer. It was giving the overture to a surrealist mixtape musical with the one-time child prodigy from Hollygrove presiding over a congregation of around 15,000 true believers who had forked over hundreds of dollars to pack the arena to the corners.
