Wale - The Mixtape About Nothing

Wale, a rapper from the DC area, has been generating a lot of buzz lately by releasing a handful of singles on iTunes and around the web. I must honestly say, I wasn't very impressed by the first few tracks that began to pop up, but he's certainly expanded his horizons with this new mixtape. The Mixtape About Nothing is a shining example of the power of free distribution as a hype machine. Taking samples and recordings from the beloved sitcom Seinfeld and cleverly intertwining them with serious issues, The Mixtape About Nothing feels incredibly fresh and dense despite the title.

Curly-cue rhymes and delivery roll of the tongue to expose the many conundrums present in the hip hop industry and community on The Mixtape About Nothing. Wale goes as far as to make a song titled "The Cliche Li'l Wayne Feature (It's The Remix Baby!)", which is one of the many highlights. It's a pretty backhanded tribute to Wayne, who despite being all over the radio, is one of the few hip hop acts to garner the money and acclaim that the genre needs for a revival. Props to Weezy for being able to make fun of himself!! I can't help but make comparisons to Lupe Fiasco. Wale pushes it further though, and succeeds Fiasco in almost every way (well, maybe not the style). Every figure in the genre is referenced, whether directly or not. He does a fantastic cover of "All I Need", an old 90's classic from the Method Man album, Tical, which itself is a remake of the Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell classic.

Wale takes a clever stab at hip hop culture by somehow finding common ground with Michael Richard's (best known for his role as Kramer on Seinfeld) racist meltdown at the Laugh Factory a couple years ago. This part of the mixtape is simply mind blowing. On the track "The Kramer", He actually sympathizes with Richard's actions by acknowledging the risk and confusion that comes with appropriation. Line after line just rolls off Wale's tongue, and the result is a single, focused song, more meaningful than anything on Nas's recent "Untitled" album. Just a handful of verses shows just how far the DC native is willing to go to push the issue: "A nigga write 'nigga' in his lyric/ Expects a white boy to omit it/ The white boy spit it like he spit it/ Recite it to his friends-- who by the way, ain't niggas." The white friends "incorporate the lyric into their everyday living," until a black friend eventually overhears them. He lets it slide-- "it's so insignificant and little"-- and soon: "The things they say went a little too far/ He couldn't tell the difference between 'a' or '-er'/ So they just kept saying 'nigga' to his face/ There's nothing he can do/ He let it get away/ It came to the point he couldn't look them in the face." Wale sees both sides of the embarrassing and confusing puzzle that is racism. He definitely isn't afraid to speak the truth.

If this is Wale's mixtape, I can only speculate with rabid rabid excitement about what an actual label release is going to be like. This mixtape is leaps and bounds better than 90% of the albums put out this year. Go check it out, free download, you won't be disappointed. Oh, and by the way, this, despite being a mixtape, squeezes past "The Bake Sale" by Cool Kids as My #1 album of 2008. Yes, it's that good.


http://www.zshare.net/download/12770681c4ad01f5/