Attention Deficit Wikipedia article Album by Wale. Triumph Mama Told Me Mirrors (featuring Bun B) Pretty Girls (featuring Gucci Mane and Weensey) World Tour.
Wale Attention Deficit Album Cover
- After building a serious buzz through mixtapes like 100 Miles & Running and the vaguely Seinfeld-themed The Mixtape About Nothing—and after signing with Mark Ronson’s Allido label—Wale makes a power move from the underground to the mainstream with his major-label debut, Attention Deficit. Wale pays reverent homage to ATCQ with “World.
- Listen free to Wale – Attention Deficit (Triumph, Mama Told Me and more). 14 tracks (55:23). Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm. Playing via Spotify Playing via YouTube.
It's no secret that the Internet is hurting rappers. Hurting their record sales. Hurting their ability to control narrative. And, perhaps most crucially, hurting their ability to self-edit. Flip cam freestyles, track-a-day mixtapes, local radio interviews delivered worldwide.
Reining it in has never been more difficult. To his credit, Wale has appeared to be in clear control of his output. In the space of three years he's released three proper mixtapes: 2007's giddy grab bag 100 Miles & Running, 2008's triumphant and savvy The Mixtape About Nothing, and this year's modest Back to the Feature.
But even that tempered rollout may have been too much. Wale's proper solo debut, Attention Deficit, feels like a mishmash of those three tapes, flashing greatness but almost never transcending, and always sounding effortful. Has he said too much already? Initially positioned as a refreshing rejoinder in a new generation of rappers, Wale was never fit for savior-dom. He's said the Roots' Black Thought is his favorite MC.
That's about right: technically gifted, occasionally thrilling, mostly destined to be a cog in a machine. Attention Deficit seems to ignore that, especially on the front end. What's made so many rap debuts successful is a fluidity, a connectivity from moment to moment. Wale's been slapped with the dreaded 'no personality' tag in recent months. The opposite is true: Wale seems to jump constantly from persona to persona. Opener 'Triumph', a terrific, Afro-beat-inspired production by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek, indicates this will be a sonic adventure.
It's not particularly. 'Mama Told Me' is a sort of post-Kanye reflection on how difficult it is coming up in the game, namedropping people in his life whose names you will not recognize. It's been done before and better. 'Mirrors' is sonically consistent- squealing horns and down-low bass- but also features that tried-and-true rap trope: the Bun B feature. It's negligible. 'Pretty Girls' is an ode to women via his native Washington D.C.
Sound, produced by longtime partner Best Kept Secret, sampling legendary Go-Go crew the Backyard Band, and featuring that group's Weensey. It's a classic hip-hop raveup, loose and fun. And then Atlanta's Gucci Mane shows up. Wasn't this supposed to be a D.C. 'World Tour' is typically bland, R&B diva-led (in this case Jazmine Sullivan) nostalgia-stroking patter.
'Let It Loose' is the Pharrell record. Six songs in and we're hitting all the bases, without any sense of what it means to be Wale.
The second half reveals a bit more: Wale is obsessed with women, whether recounting the story of a coke-addicted fameball on Mark Ronson's delicate '90210', or emotionally thrashing over an ex on the loping, gorgeous 'Diary'. He is distinctly interested in the female experience, even if the subject is launching him into paranoia by refusing to pick up the phone at 4 a.m. On a Saturday night.
This is a unique gift- I can't recall the last time an MC seemed so tapped into a woman's perspective while still feeling the chill of romantic strain. Sitek returns with the astounding 'TV in the Radio', a song that both convinced me of K'Naan as a serious rapper (debatable until now) and positioned Wale properly in the mix, rapidly firing syllables like a semi-automatic. It's a bravura performance.
'Contemplate', produced by Syience, samples Rihanna's 'Question Existing' and transforms it into a dark, brooding piece about the difficulties of love. That it arrives amidst Rihanna's troubling trauma-as-promotional run is sad and fitting. Alas, there won't be much to gain from 'Chillin', the much-maligned Lady Gaga collaboration and botched first single. This was the first step in Wale's multiple personality debacle and he seems to know as much- nothing else on Attention Deficit resembles the goofy sneakers-shouting writing here. Ironically, it's the song that directly precedes 'Chillin' that feels most truthful. 'Shades', featuring Chrisette Michele, is a resilient look at being a dark-skinned African-American (Wale is first generation Nigerian-American). On the song he raps, 'They napped and slept on me/ Man, I hate black/ Skin tone, I wish I could take it back/ But rearrange my status, maybe if I was khaki/ Associating light-skinned with classy/ The minstrel show showed a me that was not me.'
Internal rhyme schemes, halting phrasing, thoughtful self-exploration; this is Wale at his best. Not as a preening star filling in the gaps for a king-making debut. A regular person, with doubts and sadness, joy and confidence. There's just not enough of it on Attention Deficit.
Wale has been on the brink of a breakthrough for so long now that it’s neither far-fetched nor oxymoronic to refer to him as a veteran up-and-comer. Since around 2006 or so, the D.C.-based rapper with roots in the area’s local go-go scene has existed as rap’s semiofficial next best thing. He’s collaborated and toured with Mark Ronson, released a trio of high-profile mixtapes (including last year’s terrific Seinfield-themed ), and maintained a Twitter and blogospheric popularity impressive for someone who’s yet to release an official album.
So, Attention Deficit is both Wale’s major-label debut and his moment of truth, and on it he walks a fine line between selling out, repping his city, and gaining the approval of the post-backpacker underground. A lot of us who have been anticipating this album for an embarrassingly long time were worried about the first of these goals and became a little squeamish when we heard the album’s first two singles.
“Chillin” and “World Tour” (featuring Lady GaGa and Jazmine Sullivan, respectively) are both tepid Cool & Dre productions in which Wale seems to be attempting Black Eyed Peas-style halftime-show rap. But aside from these and a forgettable Neptunes track (are rappers required by law to throw Pharrell and his tinny, tired book of beats a bone every time they release an album?), the album’s crossover bids are mercilessly few. The larger trends of Attention Deficit are Wale’s further evolution as an “issues” rapper and his continued willingness to wax free-associative over outside-the-box production. Even as someone who loves TV on the Radio, I was skeptical when I heard Wale was working with the band’s Dave Sitek on a few tracks.
It sounded too much like indie cotton candy: I thought, what, are they going to put Zooey Deschanel on the hook? But Wale was rightfully confident that Sitek’s skills could translate to hip-hop, and after Attention Deficit comes out Sitek may see his Blackblerry blowing up with requests from other rappers. Wale was apparently pleased enough with these collaborations that he opens Attention Deficit with the horn-stomping Sitek jam “Triumph,” a song that captures everything that got people excited about Wale in the first place: In dizzying, freestyle-like flow, he drops a humble nod to Kanye West (“I asked Mr. West for a little bit of help/But I realized these new niggas gotta get it ourself”), cleverly references mid-‘90s Nebraska quarterback Tommy Frazier, and uses a vintage Nintendo character to make a sexual putdown (“And she swallow everything like Kirby”). I could listen to Wale go nuts over top-shelf weirdo beats for an entire album, and I guess satisfying that desire is the point of songs like “Mirrors” with Bun B, a delicious Premo-style slice of boom bap, “Pretty Girls” with Gucci Mane, and “Beautiful Bliss” with the on-fire next-next-best-thing J. But Wale’s mixtapes have proven that while the rapper is definitely interested in dominating hipster dance parties with songs like “W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E.,” he also has a conscious streak that is as important to him, if not more (‘s race parable “The Krammer” is as thought-provoking as an entire Cornel West tome). Wale continues the habit of pointing a magnifying glass at uncomfortable subject matter on Attention Deficit.
“Contemplate” and “Diary” take opposing sides of the male-female divide, and thoroughly squash the vacuous treatment Jay-Z gave to the same subject on ‘s “Venus Vs. Mars.” But Wale really lives up to his reputation for not shying away from controversy with “Shades,” a song about the racism prevalent among lighter-skinned African-Americans toward darker-skinned ones.
Wale, the son of Nigerian immigrants, raps in honest, reflective bars about a prejudice most people would like to think doesn’t exist: “I never fit in with those light skins/I felt like the lighter they was, the better their life is.” The one instance where Wale’s instinct for social examination goes astray is the uncharming Ronson-produced “90210,” which, in its caricature of the coke-nosed celebrity wannabe, flips Chuck D’s famous “hip-hop is CNN for black people” to “the CW for black people” and must have been researched entirely on TMZ.com. With his Lil Wayne-worthy punchlines, Kanye levels of heart, and Hova-approaching fluidities of flow, Wale’s not being overly presumptuous when he calls himself the “past, present, and future of hip-hop.” But that doesn’t mean he yet matches any of these dudes for originality or personality. In its ambitious attempts to revive conscious rap and push the envelope sonically, Attention Deficit may be one of the best rap releases of the year even while it lacks the focus of a central persona. As an artist, Wale is all over the place, and for the most part that’s a good thing.
If he’s going to go the distance as a rapper, though, and it’s clear at this point that that’s his objective, he’s going to have become less of a prism for sports references, celebrity jokes, and highbrow social arguments and more of a force in his own right. Donate Slant is reaching more readers than ever before, but advertising revenue across the Internet is falling fast, hitting independently owned and operated publications like ours the hardest. We’ve watched many of our fellow media sites fall by the way side in recent years, but we’re determined to stick around. We’ve never asked our readers for financial support before, and we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or subscription fees. If you like what we do, however, please consider becoming a Slant patron.
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