Wale
The Mixtape About Nothing
If you listen closely to Wale’s The Mixtape About Nothing, you can hear how the idea for his Seinfeld concept album evolved. “I get Seinfeld with these rhyme skills,” he
raps on “The Chicago Falcon Remix,” “I’m Larry David/ Give me my paper/ This a
cos’ mo’ like Jerry Sein neighbor/ My cold stanzas stand like Phantoms or
Maybachs/ You won’t get Elaine if you came whack/ I hate rap like Kramer hate
blacks.” Lacking the intricacy of many
of the other Seinfeld-inspired rhymes
on The Mixtape About Nothing, this
one must have been the first. It tells a
lot about Wale. First of all, he
obviously loves puns, as he twists Cosmo Kramer’s first name into also meaning
“cost more.” In fact, the whole thing carries the faint whiff of serious
cheese—which is typical of the dude who twisted Justice’s biggest hit into
“W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E.” Groan. But you also start to see how his mind works. Notice how he teases out the reference to
Jerry Seinfeld into something that includes three out of four of the sitcom’s
major characters. There’s an element of
literary completism in it—not 100% uncommon among the best rappers—and it’s
also an indicator of a desire to play out each of his thoughts to their extreme
conclusions. The original Seinfeld
idea—a castaway, run-of-the-mill pop-culture simile—blossoms into the larger
idea of building a whole album around his favorite television show. That, in turn, veers off into many different
directions. He raps in the structure of
one of Jerry’s stand-up routines. He
uses Michael Richards’ notorious racist tirade to dive into an intelligent
discussion about race. He even calls up
Julia Louis-Dreyfus for a cameo. This is
a guy whose mind works free-associatively, each of his ideas having a domino’s
effect on a series of other ideas.
As a concept album, The Mixtape About Nothing succeeds because Wale uses a simple concept as a starting point from which to charge in many directions. Additionally, he uses the medium of the mixtape in unique and exciting ways, and he does it with the self-awareness of Jerry Seinfeld himself. Each of the tracks are named like a Seinfeld episode, which allows him to comment on his own work as he does it. “The Roots Song Wale Is On” retitles Rising Up’s title track and blasts it at the front of the album. “The Remake of a Remake (All I Need)” and “The Cliché Lil’ Wayne Feature (It’s the Remix Baby!)” allow him to get away with common mixtape chestnuts simply by acknowledging them, sort of like the old headline from The Onion that read “Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move.” By the time he gets to final song “The Hype” (which Wale has received a good amount of, getting called “The Next Lupe Fiasco” by Entertainment Weekly, among other places), Wale has grown as an artist in leaps and bounds, over the course of the album. His flow has a relaxed and confident tone that was completely absent from the Seinfeld rhymes on “The Chicago Falcon Remix.” More importantly, Wale has pulled off the tricky gambit of The Mixtape About Nothing because he has done more than simply reference Jerry Seinfeld’s sitcom: He has embodied it by creating a postmodern album that could be about anything. A young artist who can pull that off should have some pretty great stuff ahead of him. Now, if we could just get him to work on those puns.
-Martin Brown, 2008
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