To close out the year, Crossfade is picking out its favorite albums by 305 artists. Read the full list of Miami's Best Albums of 2010 here.
Lil Wayne
I Am Not a Human Being (Young Money/Cash Money)
Lil Wayne will never stop repping his hometown of New Orleans -- just count the references to area code 504 or neighborhood Holly Grove in any given handful of tracks.
But he seems proud to call Miami his second home. After all, it was here that he celebrated his homecoming from Rikers with two parties in a row on the same Sunday night. So we'll be proud to adopt him right back and count I Am Not a Human Being in our rundown of the year's best albums by local artists.
The record dropped while Weezy was still locked up, and leave it to the reigning king of rap to score a Top 10 hit from prison. The relatively brief offering provides a snapshot of material that almost made it to the much-anticipated Tha Carter 4, and if this serves as any indication, C4 should be truly delirious.
I Am Not a Human Being trades in dizzy, extraterrestrial weirdness. Just take the opening track's title, "Gonorrhea," or its beat, built on stuttering synths that sound high on helium.
The record also netted the first proper production credit for homegrown up-and-coming knob twiddler Mike Banger, who's served as Lil Wayne's personal engineer for the past couple years.
His contribution, the bonus posse cut "YM Banger," is a surprising dark-horse closer to the album. It boasts an unashamedly electronic sound full of rattling snares and spaceship-laser crescendos, with a calculated claustrophobia that threatens to boil over at any minute.
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