Will Daniel be vindicated?
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[5.00]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: I can’t be the only person who saw the name T-Wayne and felt my nostalgia-obsessed heart beat in triple-time: He Raps! He Sings! They’re back! Alas, this is another T-Wayne, a Vine kid who’s leaped onto his six looped seconds of fame with a freestyle over Bandit Gang Marco’s “Nasty.” One thing is clear — “king of this shit, crowned by the toilet” is a terrible line that recalls terrible-but-great-shit-joke-era Wayne (aka Carter 2-era Wayne). Wayne made chicken salad out of chickenshit due to his energy and voice; T-Wayne has some ways to go, but Wayne at his peak never had the stupid-smart line about having so much wood in your car that you can build a fort. Little victories.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: A gratuitous, dorky freestyle of enthusiasm and joy, salvaging an unfairly ignored classic of 2014. Unlike Marco’s original, T-Wayne’s overloaded with zingers, the kind of thing that comes from spending your time doing Vine comedy to blow up. It’s interesting, though, because this is oddly resonant while T-Wayne’s brilliant “FEMA”/”Nasty”/“Let Me Find Out” hybrid “I Heard” did no waves. Strange to see which of these stick with people.
[6]
Crystal Leww: Like “Hot N*gga,” “Nasty Freestyle” is one big long verse. Unlike “Hot N*gga,” it’s devoid of anything resembling movement, conviction, or personality. Still, I expect to change my mind on this sometime in the next couple of weeks.
[4]
Will Adams: There’s some real nice mixing on the low end — productions like these often smear the kick drum and bass together; here it’s crystal clear — that makes it nice to listen to. Not much else going for it, though.
[5]
Ashley Ellerson: Destroying every auto-tune machine and program, as well as the camera used to shoot this video. We can’t have nice things anymore.
[1]
Alfred Soto: There’s hints of Sean Paul in this serviceable midtempo number, newly ascendant on the American top ten, enlivened by non-threatening lines about tigers and peeing on the toilet seat.
[6]
Andy Hutchins: The first line will be among the best in music in 2015: “FIRST, let me HOP out the ma’fuckin’ PORSCHE.” And for three more bars, T-Wayne continues the momentum with a sing-song flow that really did deserve to soundtrack the scores of “whip” Vines that surfaced in the wake of his remake of what was Bandit Gang Marco’s track. The rest is more mixed: Rickey Wayne — a better stage name than the one previously “taken” by the T-Pain/Lil Wayne dream project — isn’t a great rapper, and his influences, most notably Wayne’s (the “ya deeeg?” is almost pitch-perfect) show. But he’s a good and clever one; he has to be, to make a song in which he’s this much louder than the beat (smartly reduced from the Bandit Gang Marco version to a skeletal arrangement of steely synths that recalls Young Jeezy’s “Bottom of the Map”) and rapping slow enough to let listeners predict punchlines. By the time he advises that he’s “ten times sharper than Michael Myers’s machete,” it’s clear he deserves his 15 minutes in installments of more than six seconds.
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Ramzi Awn: The bumpin’ beat almost makes up for T-Wayne’s disproportionate auto-tuning. But not quite.
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