albums and tracks

Editor's rating

Kicking off proceedings with his iconic drawl (well, kind of iconic - if someone told you it was 50 Cent you probably wouldn't argue) Lil Wayne draws the attention of his audience back to his previous claims of being "the best rapper in the world". The only difference between Tha Carter and Dedication 3, according to Wayne, is that now we believe him when he makes such claims.

The track title track begins with the modest statement that "this is just a mixtape". Needless to say, the modesty ends there: "I'm a big dog/And I don't mean fleas when I say I'm ticked off."

From the first track, Lil Wayne's voice is Auto-Tuned within an inch of its life. It works, briefly, but you can't help thinking that Kanye, T-Pain et al have a lot to answer for. And that somebody somewhere needs to find a new knob to twiddle.

Ironically, for a man who spends an entire track ('Thingy Pleaser') categorising the women - or, to use his preferred term of reference, "b****es" - in his life as "d*** pleasers", the most impressive track in the mix comes courtesy of 'Still I Rise', featuring Nicki Minaj on vocals.

Minaj is also put through the Auto-Tune mangle, just in case listeners haven't quite latched on to the flexibility of this particular production tool already, but her close-to-the-bone character assassination has 10 times more bite than anything else on Dedication 3. It's not a bad mixtape, by any means. But it really is "just a mixtape".

Hayley Avron