I thought Lil Wayne was prolific?

Remember when there was gonna be a new Lil Wayne album this summer? What ever happened to that?

I saw a report somewhere the other day that Wayne decided to push back the Rebirth to focus on his label, Young Money, but I'm assuming he's just been too high to focus on finishing the album. The last report I'd read re: Lil Wayne before that was about how he was being sued for failing to show up to a concert, because he was too high. They showed up to his hotel room to collect him and deliver him to the venue, but he was too fucked the fuck up to even wake up. Damn. I'm not gonna lie - I've been that fucked, too. But it's not like I had anywhere to be. They were just trying to wake me up to see if I wanted to do any more partying, which obviously I didn't want to.

I doubt Lil Wayne actually has to do anything as the president of Young Money, and also the president of Cash Money, if he's still the president of Cash Money. I know they've got that Drake album coming out, and it's imperative that it do well, but I'm assuming there's a room of white people somewhere in charge of that. If I was Drake, I'd probably insist on it, even if I didn't necessarily let on to Lil Wayne that I did. Then there's Nicki Minaj. Hopefully he's just keeping her around for head purposes. Probably no female rap album would sell very well these days, even if it was good (I know...), and I'm assuming she's not very good, even though I've never heard any of her stuff. She's definitely not very good-looking.

I was looking at this site's news section, because I'm leaving town in the morning and I don't have time to come up with anything original or worth reading, and it occurred to me: if I'm one of these rappers, I'm trying to get my shit out there ASAP. Album sales are fucked the fuck up, and they're probably not gonna get any better. So far, that new Eminem album has only sold 1.2 million. It probably would have sold twice as much, a few years ago. Did you know there wasn't even a new rap album released last week? Or rather, there wasn't a new rap album that ranked anywhere in the top 200 of Billboard. I'm sure some bum put out a rap album last week - it just didn't sell 200 copies, or whatever it takes to make the chart these days.

The pressure has to be on Lil Wayne to come up with a followup to Tha Carter III. Oh, what it must be like to be a fly on the wall in the Universal building these days. They must be sweating bullets. Some TI is gonna fuck around and have to let his fourth home go into foreclosure behind this shit. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd probably just collect some of that garbage from his shedload of mixtapes, put it on a disc and call that the Rebirth. It's not like his last album sounded like he put a significant amount of time and thought into it, and you see how well that sold. Maybe they should just send him off on a month-long bender somewhere and go for it.

They probably would try some shit like that, except you never can tell with these Lil Wayne albums. As much as I rag on Lil Wayne, I was way wrong about Tha Carter III. As that album's release date approached, I thought he was approaching some sort of personal and artistic nadir, and I'm pretty sure he was. It sold like pancakes anyway. Then there was that EP the label put out at the end of '07, when it became obvious that he wasn't gonna have an album out for Christmas, even though he'd been on the covers of the last six issues of XXL in a row. I would have thought that would have been a good idea, but it only sold like 8 copies. If it came out this week, it wouldn't even have cracked the top 200.

So yeah, I've been wrong about these things before. Maybe Lil Wayne is way more of a genius than I think, and he's just taking the time to make sure the Rebirth turns out as well as Tha Carter III. Maybe there is such a thing as rapper racist, and I'm it. Even if there isn't, it hasn't been such a bad thing not being inundated with Lil Wayne this summer. I probably shouldn't even be discussing why it's taking him so long to release another album. That's just gonna cause him to be that much more prolific, to spite. If anything, I should probably travel to wherever he is and give him some more drugs.