Album Spotlight: Dedication 5

This morning I downloaded Dedication 5, and I was pretty excited to see that I had about 30 new songs from Lil Wayne. Dedication 5 was supposed to come out at 5PM on Friday afternoon, but then had a delay when Wayne chose to go back and record new material. Tunechi announced that he had sent the project over to Drama, but Drama then had to wake up and get in the studio with the

project while at the "same damn time" (get it lol) handling a DJ gig. Now after hearing it just 1TYM (for your mind), I take that back and have to admit that I now have 5 songs from it left in my library. Every other one was deleted. Honestly, I shouldn’t slam on Weezy because I should not have expected anything different, but I bought into the hype he created, and was seriously let down. After realizing his name was hardly called at this year’s BET and MTV Awards, Lil Wayne made a promise via Twitter telling his fans that he would work twice as hard, or he’d rather die. If Dedication 5 was his attempt at showing his fans his work ethic is improving, all Lil Wayne fans should find a new artist.  

Dedication 5 is a compilation of Wayne rapping with no creative touch over beats from artists like Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, Jay-Z, and Drake. Also, Weezy gave us a few of his own beats, but the only songs worth hearing might be the ones mentioned above. Probably the only positive news related to Dedication 5 is that it’s free. I hate to hate on music, because everyone has different taste, but I just couldn’t find it in me to say anything different. The two best ones in my opinion are “UOENO”, and “Cream.” Gudda Gudda and Tunchi bodies the track “Devastation”, but that’s as raw as it gets. Outside of Tunechi’s rhymes, Dedication 5 also falls out of line with the Dedication series for other reasons. Many of the industry beats Wayne tackles aren’t the actual beats, but redone versions of them. The approach was likely done to avoid clearance issues and copyright, but it makes the tape feel a bit incomplete. 

One glimpse throughout the tape, Lil Wayne revisits what made the original Dedication series so effective: album quality original songs and creative remixes of radio hits, the only problem is the quality of the song. Wayne is mimicking the original songs’ flows more than tackling them in a new way. Weak lines like, “had a phone in jail, that’s a cell phone” and “I’ll have people looking for you, like a reason” shows Weezy F. babie’s regression. In the “How Dedicated” intro to Dedication 5, Lil Wayne said that the Dedication mixtape series has meant the same thing that it always has, but many backpackers and hip-hop heads would disagree. In the first two DJ Drama-projects from 2005 and 2006, Weezy was hungry and revolutionized the mixtape game by taking on his strongest ambitions and claiming the title of the best rapper alive. As for this mixtape, the highlights are enjoyable, but too many songs fade into the background, making it ruff to find D5’s swag.  
        

Derek Lugo