Funeral (Lil Wayne album)

In 2016, while Lil Wayne was in the midst of the legal battle with Cash Money Records over contractual disputes, it was announced that his next album would be titled Funeral.[4] The album was completed in 2019, as Wayne started promoting the album again.[5][6] In an interview with Vibe, Lil Wayne spoke on how his recording process changed throughout his career, saying:

I love the difficulty of trying to fit in with what's going on today, making sure I sound likeable to the ears today and having to remind myself that it's not about what it was back then. […] I can't wait to get in the studio now every night, just to see what I can come up with. [Before] it was just me going to the studio and saying, let me kill ten more songs and then I'm going to go home or do whatever I was doing. Now, it's let me see what I come up with. Self-discovery, rebirth – call it whatever you want to call it but it feels awesome, I swear to God.[7]

Lil Wayne explained the title Funeral as a continuation of his album Rebirth in 2010, to follow-up on the series.[8][9] The track "Bing James" concludes with 24 seconds of silence, paying tribute to the death of Kobe Bryant. The album also contains 24 tracks on the standard edition and 8 tracks on the deluxe edition, honoring Kobe Bryant's jersey numbers with the Los Angeles Lakers.[10]

The calligraphic text on the cover features a rotational ambigram. It reads Funeral right side up and Lil Wayne upside down.[11]

On January 23, 2020, Lil Wayne revealed the album's release date and artwork.[12] With the announcement, he also teased a snippet of the album's title track.[13][14][15]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	5.9/10[16]
Metacritic	62/100[17]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[18]
Consequence of Sound	B–[19]
Exclaim!	6.0/10[20]
The Guardian	[21]
NME	[22]
Pitchfork	7.3/10[23]
Rolling Stone	[24]

Funeral was met with positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 62, based on 10 reviews.[25] Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 5.9 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus.[26]

In a mixed review, Christopher Thiessen of Consequence of Sound wrote: "Funeral plays less like an album and more like a mixtape. For his new decade debut, Wayne takes a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' approach, only hitting the target about half the time. Wayne is at his best when he dives into a beat and shows off his technical skill. He still has endless punchlines to punctuate his effortless flow. He still has clear vision and awareness of his place in the hip-hop game. However, Wayne is not a great editor, and thus listening to Funeral can become exhausting about halfway through. While listeners may be fatigued, however, Wayne is far from it. Funeral isn't an ending point or a period at the end of a successful career. It's an ellipsis, a thought to be continued next time Weezy graces the studio".[27] Jacob Carey of Exclaim! criticized the length of the album, stating: "While Funeral isn't necessarily a flop, the album would have ranked higher in Lil Wayne's discography had he cut the tracklist in half and opted for quality over quantity. Overall, Funeral lacks replay value compared to the multiple 'best of the year' albums that Wayne has proven capable of creating."[28]

NME's Thomas Hobbs found the album inconsistent, writing: "The problem with Funeral is that there's no real thread holding the music together. For every exhilarating left turn ('Mama Mia' was made to open up the mosh pits), there's a soulless radio anthem such as 'Clap For Em' – and that's before we even mention the unspeakable Adam Levine duet 'Trust Nobody'. At nearly 80 minutes long, Funeral is obviously bloated and an attempt to play into streaming politics, and it's a real shame that the ambitious druggy swirl of some of the earlier material is replaced with more formulaic songwriting".[29]

Danny Schwartz of Rolling Stone gave the album a negative review, saying "Funeral is wildly uneven, a landscape of pronounced highs and lows. In truth, it peaks early, on 'Mahogany'." Schwartz called "Trust Nobody" the worst song on the album, labeling it a "sunk by a banal and out-of-place Adam Levine hook, while noting that "Get Out Of My Head" is "soured by the great rap pedant XXXTentacion" and called "Sights and Silencers" a "surprisingly limp The-Dream ballad that he should have just given to Jeremih". Schwartz concluded: "Funeral is pockmarked with duds [...] Lil Wayne's previous album, Tha Carter V, was also overlong, but it was at least anchored by a gentle familial undercurrent. Aside from a few moments, like 'Bastard (Satan's Kid)' which touches on Wayne's father's neglectful parenting, Funeral is emotionally adrift. As Wayne heads into a new decade—his fourth as a professional rapper—it's hard to [know] where his head is at, where he's coming from, or where he's going".[30]

Conversely, Pitchfork's Sheldon Pearce gave an overall positive review, saying "Weezy is back in the booth and cruising, experimenting with an array of styles and a dizzying maze of wordplay".[23] Furthermore, writing for The Guardian, Kitty Empire gave the album a positive review, saying "Wayne's unheralded 13th studio album proves that the 37-year-old's flow can still be fearsome, even if his edit function remains iffy".[31]

Funeral debuted atop the US Billboard 200 dated February 15, 2020, with 139,000 album-equivalent units, of which 38,000 were pure album sales. It is Lil Wayne's fifth US number-one album.[32]

Notes

• ^{^[a]} signifies a co-producer
• ^{^[b]} signifies an additional producer
• ^{^[c]} signifies an uncredited co-producer[33][34][35]
• "Dreams" features additional vocals by Ben Burgess
• "Get Outta My Head" samples "The Boy With The Black Eyes" by XXXTENTACION

Sample credits

• "Mahogany" contains samples from "Bass Song", written and performed by Eryn Kane.[36]
• "Clap for Em" contains samples from "Drag Rap (Triggerman)", written by Orville Hall and Phillip Price, as performed by The Showboys.[37]
• "Harden" contains samples from "Love Me or Leave Me", written by Donald Breedlove, Herb Pilhofer and Napoleon Crayton, as performed by Band of Thieves. Found and cleared through Tracklib.[38]

Musicians

• Jonathan Buice – string arranger (track 1), keyboards (track 1)
• Memru Renjaan – guitar (track 1), electric bass (track 1)

Technical

• Matthew Testa – engineering (tracks 1–5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15–20, 23, 24)
• Manny Galvez – engineering (tracks 1–7, 9–16, 18, 20–24)
• Jeff Edwards – engineering (tracks 8, 9, 13)
• Mailbox – engineering (track 10)
• EJ – engineering (tracks 11, 22)
• Chef – engineering (track 14)
• Steven McDowell – engineering (tracks 17, 21)
• Jason Delattiboudere – recording assistant (tracks 1–3, 5–24), remix engineering assistant (track 4)
• Patrick Kehrier – recording assistant (tracks 6, 10, 19)
• Eddie Taylor – recording assistant (track 17)
• Raymond Auzenne – recording arranger (track 19)
• Fabian Marasciullo – mixing (all tracks)
• Thomas McLaren – mixing assistant (track 1–17, 19–24)
• Morgan David – mixing assistant (track 18)
• Robert Soukiasyan – additional mixing (track 18)