The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
the b-side
Thursday, January 22, 2015 — 3B
On new mixtape,
Lil Wayne airs his
grievances
By WILL GREENBERG
Daily Arts Writer
Lil Wayne is incredibly sorry.
Again.
For the second time in a row,
Wayne is battling his label, Cash
Money,
to
release the next
installment
in
his Tha Carter
album
series.
Tha Carter V
was originally
scheduled
to
come out late
October
2014,
then early December. The release
date is now TBD.
As an apology to his fans,
Wayne released “Sorry 4 the Wait
2,” a mixtape of his own rap on top
of other artists’ beats and some of
his own. It’s a move akin to that
of Leslie Knope (I was late on a
deadline? Here’s a “little some-
thing” I threw together for you).
For fans, it’s hard to stay mad at a
guy who keeps his constituency at
the forefront of his mind.
Now, I should make a brief
disclaimer: I’ve long had mixed
feelings about Lil Wayne. On one
hand, I spent half of my fresh-
man year playing his bangers on
repeat in my dorm room, memo-
rizing every word of songs like
“A Milli,” “6 Foot 7 Foot” and
“Love Me.” On the other hand,
I’m
generally
underwhelmed
by his deeper tracks. His work
as a whole doesn’t grab me, and
he’s not in my top five. As a rock
analogy, I’d compare him to Van
Halen: there’s plenty of talent to
be impressed with, but purists of
the genre probably don’t consider
it top echelon material. That said:
I found plenty to like in this tape.
Sorry 4 the Wait 2 goes beyond
a mere apology project. Notable
tracks include previously released
“Shit,” and “Fingers Hurting,”
both examples of Lil Wayne in
prime form. He gives his own
take on some of the hottest beats
from 2014, including “Tuesday”
(ILoveMakonnen), “Hot Nigga”
(Bobby Shmurda)and “Drunk in
Love” (Beyoncé). I’d even say he
tops the original artists on “No
Type” (Rae Sremmurd) and
“Coco” (O.T. Genasis).
In true Weezy fashion, the
rap is a mix of aggressive flow
and slower discussions of his
encounters with notably attrac-
tive women. There are also plen-
ty of Wayne’s classic two-line
zings that make me smile in spite
of myself — like on “Trap House”
where he says “I wrote a letter to
my competition / it started off
with dearly departed.”
Included on the tape are ade-
quate contributions from Drake
and 2 Chainz. Also featured are
the lesser known Mack Maine
and Shanell, as well as Chris-
tina Milian on “Drunk In Love.”
Each track is laced with apolo-
gies as Wayne flexes his rapping
prowess across 17 songs.
Weezy fans should be satis-
fied for a short time with this
mixtape. Why shouldn’t they
be? Wayne is going beyond the
call of duty here so he can only
surpass expectations in my eyes.
Plus, he’s putting out more music
while waiting for his eleventh
studio album. He’s no slouch.
So, no need to apologize to us,
Weezy. I’m sorry for you.
Wayne has publicly expressed
his understandable frustration
with Cash Money. This is the
second major release he’s had
to delay — the rapper issued
Sorry 4 the Wait in 2011 when
Tha Carter IV’s release was
similarly delayed. Wayne took
to Twitter this past December,
reporting “To all my fans, I want
u to know that my album won’t
and hasn’t been released bekuz
Baby & Cash Money Rec. refuse
to release it,” adding in another
Tweet that “this is not my fault.”
He also announced his inten-
tions to get out of the “f***ed up”
situation soon at the Vice 20th
Anniversary concert; his man-
ager quickly denied that Wayne
would be leaving Cash Money,
saying he was “being sarcastic.”
It’s hard to downplay how
detrimental label issues can be
for rap artists. The most nota-
ble example is probably Azealia
Banks,
whose
debut
album
Broke With Expensive Taste was
delayed for over two years and
was only released in Septem-
ber 2014 after she left Universal
Music in July. During the wait,
Banks lost most of the hype
she’d accumulated with her sin-
gle “212” and another, similarly
named, female rapper rose into
the spotlight. Obviously, Wayne
isn’t fighting to get noticed as
an up-and-comer the way Banks
was, but the delay could very
well prove damaging to Tha
Carter V’s legacy.
Instead of releasing the album
in 2014, a relatively quiet year for
hip-hop releases in my eyes, he
will now have to fight for noto-
riety with Kanye West, Kend-
rick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, Drake,
Big Sean, A$AP Rocky, Pusha T,
Earl Sweatshirt, Kid Cudi — the
list goes on and on.
This isn’t at all to say that the
album will go unnoticed, and if
Sorry 4 the Wait 2 is any indica-
tor, then it could very well hold
its own as a top album of the
year. Still, I think it’s safe to say
us listeners are more concerned
if Lil Wayne can survive the wait
— not the other way around.
VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily
Taylor directs the University’s undergraduate creative writing program.
Keith Taylor talks
the poetry of nature
University
professor shares
creative inspiration
By CATHERINE SULPIZIO
Senior Arts Editor
“I’m not much of an academ-
ic,” Keith Taylor says to a dubi-
ous interviewer.
Despite what some would call
his lack of traditional academic
pedigree, it’s clear that the
coordinator for the University’s
undergraduate creative writing
program, Bear River Writers’
Conference director and poetry
editor for the Michigan Quar-
terly Review speaks the schol-
arly language. Taylor is telling
me about working in Ann Arbor
bookstores in the ’80s through
’90s, specifically in Shaman
Drum, one of those bookstores
that doesn’t exist anymore, lit-
erally (it closed in 2009) and
figuratively (its tagline was
“academic and scholarly books
in the humanities”).
Despite his easy admission
that Ann Arbor’s bookstore
scene is a ghost of itself, there
is a vital, persisting joy Taylor
holds for the printed page. I
was briefly in his intermediate
poetry class last fall, and he is
the type of teacher whose joy
for the text is infectious, one
who promises to restore the
immediate pleasure of reading
to literature’s sometimes anti-
septic field of study. If you need
convincing, listen to Taylor
read Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My
Socks” (hint: you’ll have to take
his class); his voice takes on the
same woolen, nubby texture as
Neruda’s language, warm and
dry. It’s the poet’s recitation, by
an artist who knows his craft
inside and out, and understands
how poetry blurs its linguistic
and spatial modalities: “Ode to
My Socks” is a long, thin poem,
not unlike a pair of socks.
Yet beneath Taylor’s elemen-
tal regard for poetry, which
strikes the observer as visceral
and instantaneous, is a long and
winding, self-informed study.
Taylor’s trajectory as a poet
started after moving to South
Bend, Indiana, in seventh grade.
Raised in a self-described “reli-
gious Mennonite family” in
rural Western Canada, to Tay-
lor, urban South Bend in the late
’60s was a culture shock.
“I spoke funny,” Taylor said.
“My English teacher used to fail
me because I spelled ‘color’ and
‘meter’ and ‘favor’ and ‘center’
wrong. I didn’t know anybody,
only had a couple friends.”
But sometime around then,
Taylor wrote a rudimentary
poem.
“I was looking out my win-
dow, looking at snow falling on
our blue-collar neighborhood in
South Bend and I wrote some
words down. I went to school
— I was Taylor, near the end of
the alphabet, and I was next to
this guy Zart — and I showed it
to him. He said, ‘That should be
a poem, actually.’ I asked, ‘Well
what’s a poem do?’ and he said,
‘You spread it out across the
page and make it look funny.’
So I did, and it was the first
stroke I got in American school;
my teacher loved it. And then
I realized poets were so cool. I
wasn’t an athlete and there’s no
way I could be cool, except by
being different.”
Afterward, Taylor read vora-
ciously. I asked him who he was
reading when he was 16.
“Oh everybody, I was read-
ing everything. I was reading
biographies,” he said, naming
off a handful of touchstones
for every young writer — Yeats,
the High Modernists Eliot and
Pound — before continuing, “I
had no one teaching me. But
when I was 16 or so, I got kind
of obsessed with Kazantzakis.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, that is,
the Greek author known for
that vibrant work “Zorba the
Greek,” a restless, poetic paean
to the sensual life. The book is
tamped with, as Taylor put it,
“sex, sand and passion.” And
it’s fitting that adolescent Tay-
lor zeroed in on an author who
wrote about the call to adven-
ture. After a semester in col-
lege, Taylor moved to Europe
for four years, during which
he worked a series of manual
jobs: washing dishes, sweeping
floors and building houses, all
while he learned French so he
could read the country’s litera-
ture.
By the time Taylor returned
to the United States, he had
been submitting work to liter-
ary journals since the age of 16
(he recalls mailing poems to
Harper’s in high school), and
first got published at 18. And,
as he worked his way through
Ulrich’s, the original Borders
and Shaman Drum, Taylor con-
tinued writing. At the time —
the mid-eighties — Ann Arbor
was something of a book-lov-
er’s utopia.
“If Borders had stayed an
Ann Arbor store, we were going
to build the best bookstore on
the world, right on State Street.
They were very generous with
what they paid, with profit
sharing at the end of the year,
but that all changed when they
went corporate, so I left in ’89.”
It was an opportune moment.
Taylor continued, “All the way
through the eighties I was
writing.
I
published
some
chapbooks, and was published
pretty widely in the regional
press. But then, in 1991, I got a
fellowship in poetry from the
National Endowment for the
Arts. I was the only writer to
get one in Michigan for a few
years. So that’s when the Uni-
versity asked me to teach. Now,
it’s a prize that when people
get, they take a few years off,
but for me it freed me up so that
I could teach.”
Taylor’s poetry is the lan-
guage of nature. He bird-
watches, collaborates with the
University’s School of Music,
Theatre & Dance on environ-
mental
performances
and
spends summers at the Uni-
versity’s
Biological
Station.
In 1991, Taylor participated
in Isle Royale National Park’s
Artist-in-Residence
Program
near Lake Superior and wrote
a series of poems about the
island’s famous wolf study,
which according to its web-
site, is “the longest continuous
study of any predator-prey sys-
tem in the world.” And when
we met at recently opened The
Espresso Bar in Ann Arbor,
Taylor had just come from a
meeting in the Program for the
Environment.
I asked how his nature
poems grappled with politics.
Hidden beneath his poems,
with their unadorned, careful
language that brings to bear
their subject’s sprawling sover-
eignty, how could there not be?
The political focus was not eas-
ily excavated, Taylor believed.
“I like to think there is a
political
undertone
to
my
poems, especially ones about
the natural world,because of
the loss.” Taylor said, “But I
don’t believe loss is irreparable.
I don’t believe that’s all we have
to write about.”
“In the prose, in the reviews
or the articles,” he continued,
“I’ll be more explicit about
political
and
environmental
issues, but they have become
rather hidden in my poems,
especially in my mature work.”
And
as
the
conversation
turned to the Romantics —
that revolutionary group of
artists who confronted the
political system with their
nature-imbued,
emotionally
cued poetry — Taylor seemed
to answer his question further:
“The contrast of what they
were writing about, about as
opposed to the political system,
made itself so obvious that it
was a political moment.”
Taylor’s poems bristle with
life.
Ancient
figures
drift
through the scapes, perhaps
mechanized by his long-held
interest in Greek language and
writing, and their details — the
narrators, the characters, the
spaces — which pivot between
center and periphery, are culled
and placed for maximum effect.
In a scattering of lines, Taylor’s
words snap to life.
Keith Taylor’s latest chap-
book of poetry and prose Fideli-
ties will be published in 2015 by
Alice Greene & Co.
TRAILER REVIEW
Immediately
illuminated
by a sort of wizard-rabbit, the
name of George Lucas’s pro-
duction com-
pany
casts
a shadow of
expectancy
over the trail-
er of “Strange
Magic.”
The
mysti-
cal world of
the
film
is
divided into a kingdom of the
traditionally “good” and cute
creatures, while the “bad”
creatures must reside in a
dark forest. A potion destroys
the order of things, and a
menagerie of elves, fairies and
some wooden-looking goblins
must fight to restore it.
The
musical
draws
on
familiar songs from Michael
Franti and The Temptations
to move along the skimpy
storytelling. While the voice
acting and singing appears
adequate and the animation
looks brilliant, the story gets
lost in the haze of jokes and
child-like elves warning that
derrières should “prepare to
be shaken.”
Lucas’s act of attempted
ostranenie for these univers-
es is unfortunately derivative
of many films before it, nota-
bly “Epic” and “Shrek.” The
trailer also gives no indica-
tion of the voice actors behind
the visually stunning char-
acters, though if one were so
inclined they could find a cast
including Kristin Chenoweth,
Maya Rudolph and Alan Cum-
ming. While unshakably sim-
ilar to other films of its kind,
the animation and talents of
the voice acting of “Strange
Magic” may prove to be its
saving graces.
-REBECCA LERNER
20TH CENTURY FOX
B
Strange
Magic
20th Century Fox
MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW
Charli XCX and Rita Ora take
us on a neon-filtered, Thelma
and
Louise-reminiscent
ride
in their new
video for the
UK
version
of
Charli’s
“Doing It.”
We watch
these
two
badass bandits
rob
a
gas
station
and
evade the police while getting
chased through the desert in
their bright pink monster truck.
Along the way, they encounter
some
nipple
tassel-wearing
police officers and even enjoy
a good, old-fashioned bull ride.
Unlike the movie, the video ends
on a happier note, with a loosely
choreographed dance number
featuring Charli in a platinum
pink,
barely-there
cowgirl
outfit. The outrageous video
pairs well with the lighthearted
track, making it an undeniably
good time.
“Doing
It”
originally
appeared on Charli’s critically
successful 2014 album Sucker.
This new version of the track,
which includes the seamlessly
blended verse from Ora, was
released earlier this year and
will be featured on the UK
version of Sucker, set for release
in February.
-RACHEL KERR
ASYLUM RECORDS
A-
‘Doing It’
Charli XCX
feat. Rita Ora
Asylum Records
Weezy says he’s
‘Sorry 4 the Wait’
ALBUM REVIEW
B+
Sorry 4 the
Wait 2
Lil Wayne
Self Released
WHAT’SNEW ON
“There’s
a political
undertone to my
poems.”
Taylor’s work
bristles with life.