Too much Xeroxing invariably degrades the image: the result crawls agonisingly along like a bloke on a donkey cart in the São Paulo rush hour. But here, poor old Apoclaypto, Jewfro, KY et al have been employed to try and copy the sound of a heavy metal band trying to copy the sound of a hip-hop record. Instead, the album relies on a host of hip-hop producers and session musicians drawn from the recording world's most rarefied echelons, where your talent demands an amazing nickname: Eddie 'Krack Keys' Montilla, Calos 'Apocalypto' Hernandez, Edward 'Jewfro' Lidow and the thought-provokingly named Finis 'KY' White. Collaborations with Lenny Kravitz and Pete Wentz, of trainer-bra pop-punkers Fall Out Boy, were announced, then scrapped. That said, the omens for his rock album Rebirth augur ill. It wasn't just that 2008's Tha Carter III bucked hip-hop's declining commercial fortunes by selling more than a million copies in a week, it's that it did it with a sprawling, strange, wildly inventive and brilliant album: it succeeded by challenging the listener, rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator. After all, he's big on confounding expectations. Either people view it as a challenge or they've noted that, ever since Walk This Way revived Aerosmith's career and catapulted Run DMC to mainstream stardom, it's carried the promise of untold riches: you might think Limp Bizkit's records are unlovable by anyone who isn't an idiot, but their sales figures suggest there might be a lot of idiots knocking about the place.Īnd perhaps Wayne Carter can transform rap-metal's image.

Artistically, at least, rap-metal seems to be pop's own Red Bull Flugtag: the best you can hope for is an inglorious plummet, with a load of berks in big shorts cheering you on, but that doesn't seem to stop people getting involved. Y ou might think Limp Bizkit's oeuvre and their ghastly fanbase of hooting fratboy morons might act as a dire warning to anyone trying to meld hip-hop and heavy metal, but apparently not.

Lil wayne rebirth 2 review