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Music

A Year of Lil Wayne: It's Just About Resurrection Time

Happy Easter Weekend!

Day 207: "I'm So Over You" feat. Shanell – Rebirth, 2010

Today, all over America, families will be celebrating the spring festivities that come with Easter, the original archetypal Rebirth. And so today it makes sense to discuss another resurrection, the one in the hook of Lil Wayne's "I'm So Over You," which is about resurrecting your sense of self after a breakup and is also a rebirth in the sense that it is on the Lil Wayne rock album, Rebirth. That album wasn't exactly a resurrection: It came at the height of Wayne's career, following his most successful album, Tha Carter III, and it was pretty roundly seen as something closer to a career-killing move, a questionable left turn from an artist who had been given the latitude to do basically anything he wanted to do. It was a bit like your parents telling you you could buy any one thing in the mall and you deciding to go to Hot Topic to get a spiked bracelet.

Nonetheless, it did provide more of a palate cleansing effect than might have been expected. Wayne went to prison shortly after its release, so fans ended up having to sit with it longer than Wayne probably intended. And it certainly marked a new phase, a demarcation point from the lights-out rapping of No Ceilings. Rather than launching Wayne as a Steven Tyler-esque rock star, it had more the effect of drawing a dividing line between the craft-obsessed rapping of the preceding years and the rock star pop indulgence of the years to come. Which, from a personal quality of life standpoint, might not have been such a bad thing for Wayne. Either way, this terrible song was a resurrection, so take it with you as you consider resurrections of a different type this weekend.

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