Lil Wayne's 2011 mixtape
Sorry 4 the Wait (so named because of how long he was taking to deliver the long-awaited fourth volume of his Tha Carter series) was his first release after serving eight months of a one-year jail sentence on Riker's Island. Following the style of his No Ceilings series,
Sorry 4 the Wait finds
Weezy rapping over other artists' hits of the era, this time spitting ferociously over the instrumentals for
Adele's "Rolling in the Deep,"
Drake's "Marvin's Room,"
Kreayshawn's "Gucci Gucci," and nine others.
Wayne's mixtapes throughout the mid-2000s and into the 2010s were where he could experiment and move through ideas quickly, and
Sorry 4 the Wait adds an especially unhinged, overstimulated character to his stream-of-consciousness flows. The ultra-lewd sex rhymes on "Tunechi's Room" clash wildly with the song's soft synthy backdrop, and he sputters recklessly between brags about money, murder threats, and musical superiority on "Grove Party," sounding impatient to get to each new bar. "IDK" finds multi-tracked vocals from
Wayne screaming over himself in a series of shout-outs and random yells but no rapping at all, while the instrumental from
Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls)" underscores the chaos like a nervous bystander.
Sorry 4 the Wait is relatively short, and while it's not
Wayne's best or most essential work, it's a wildly colorful snapshot of the strange and transitional period of his work around this time. He was coming down from a nonstop run of greatness and settling into a string of releases like the ill-advised 2010 rock crossover album
Rebirth and the less-than-legendary
The Carter IV, and
Sorry 4 the Wait speaks to the scrambled nature of
Wayne's output and mental state in the early 2010s. There's still more talent here than in most rappers' entire careers, and the energy is fun and lawless throughout, but this is where the cracks in the armor start becoming as noticeable as the shine coming off of it. ~ Fred Thomas