No longer is he a mixtape warrior building a fan base by samizdat flood. Lil Wayne’s sober era also coincides with the height of his celebrity. It’s less manic, less experimental, less unpredictable and, oddly, less consistent. He may or may not be struggling with drugs, but his music sounds almost nothing like drug-era Lil Wayne. Art isn’t proof of sobriety, or of anything really, but this album is consistent with the rest of the music from Lil Wayne’s sober period: literal, conventional, spotty. That’s an allusion to a lyric on a song - “Beat” for short the rest is unprintable - on his new album, “I Am Not a Human Being II” (Cash Money). He posted a video in which he seemed lucid and giddy, and invited doubters to “kiss my fist.” (His team insisted the reports were untrue.) But a few days later, at least, all seemed to be fine. This month, when TMZ reported that Lil Wayne had been hospitalized for seizures related to excessive syrup consumption, it wasn’t hard to believe. “I was on something that the doctor prescribed. “I wish I could be back on it,” he told GQ in 2011, when asked about syrup, the promethazine-codeine concoction. He spoke about it not as an addict reformed but as someone wrongly separated from his tonic. As part of a plea agreement in a separate drug possession case, he consented to regular drug tests. For three years at least, sobriety was to be his sidekick. Lil Wayne has long been one of hip-hop’s loosest cannons, but his narrative changed dramatically in 2010 after his release from Rikers Island jail, where he spent eight months on a weapons charge.
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