mixtape maestro (2.0)

So this really is happening, huh?

From the moment “Prom Queen” made it’s initial leaking waves across the World Wide Web, you could almost feel millions of question mark keys being rapidly tapped on in response to Wayne’s latest wacky career move, typed outcries of “What the hell is he thinking?!?”, “This sucks!!” and “What happened to the The Carter IV” taking hostage of various comment sections damn near instantaneously.

Is “Prom Queen” horrid? Well…on first listen, definitely. But “Lollipop” wasn’t necessarily praised off-the-bat either, and it went on to become an un-ignorable pop phenomenon, earning kudos as one of the greatest records of the year along the way.

Like “Lollipop”‘s riff on sex jam R&B, “Queen” offers a fairly generic take on modern rock theatrics that somehow manages to become less grating in multiple listens, when you can start to slowly build an appreciation for it’s quite accessible thrashing abouts and the fairly decent song sketch waxing sorrow about the high school girl Weezy didn’t get that lurks behind all the metal hurrah. In comparison to the songs that can usually be found near the top of Billboard’s Modern Rock list, “Queen” is actually not all that bad and Maestro gets the sense that really soon, it could emerge as Wayne’s next Hot 100 leader.

Now is an entire album of this really needed? No, but it’s not like it would be the worst thing he could do. He saves that for the ear-bleeding (albeit down right hilarious) R&B ballad “Around The Way Girl”, a new mixtape concoction which can best be summed up as a drunken R. Kelly impersonation that suddenly takes a detour into the land of Paisley Park with it’s guitar solo and painful falsetto-sprinkled finale.

DL: “Around The Way Girl” (alt)