Pitchfork

Lil Wayne has been pulling supposed rock-star moves for a minute now: playing guitar (horribly) at his shows, jumping onstage with Kid Rock at a couple of awards shows, ingesting vast quantities of drugs. And earlier in the month, Wayne protegee Drake reported that Wayne's next album would be a full-on rock record. I'd hoped that this was another one of the bajillions of unfounded Wayne reports flying around the internet-verse. But no. This is really happening.

According to MTV, Rebirth, Wayne's rock album, is due April 7, and apparently this is the Carter III reboot he's been talking up in interviews for a while now. "Prom Queen", the first single, will begin streaming from Wayne's MySpace page on January 27. (Or, um, all over the internet now.) And so another great rapper decides he doesn't want to rap anymore. Ack.

The worst part of this whole thing is that Wayne can still rap like a motherfucker when he wants to. "Yes", the Pharrell collaboration that hit the internet a couple of weeks back, is easily my favorite song of this young year. But apparently he's done with rapping, at least for the moment. It is impossible to overstate how bad this is going to suck.