Ooh, the haters is fucking mad! Lil Wayne's Carter III cover appeared on Amazon yesterday, and every hip-hop fan with a keyboard up in arms.

That's it. It's an infant sporting Weezy's notorious face tattoos, perhaps an image of young Wayne himself. Who knows what the real meaning behind it is--I'm sure Weezy will have something to say about it later--but who really cares? It's a cover that made you look twice. It's a cover that made you think twice. It's a cover that's probably going down in history. In the case of most mainstream rap bloggers, it's a cover that made you hit capslock and pound out an indignant, "WTF, WTF!"

WTF is right. What's the fucking big deal? Your favorite rapper's favorite rapper already put a baby on the cover of his greatest album, released more than a decade ago.

Or were you so ignorant that you forgot about Ready to Die? And if that's not enough for you, did you also forget your other favorite rapper's seminal album cover?

I mean cry me a fucking river mainstream bloggers. "Oh, holy shit! There's a baby on the cover! And look, he's got (fake) tattoos all over his mug!" What passes for commentary in most of the blogosphere is a joke, and as far as art criticism goes, the top writers are about as status quo as it gets. Of course they love Kanye's recent cover yet hate Wayne's. Of course they'll pan a cover with an infant on it, completely neglecting the history of hip-hop's greats.

In the grand tradition of rap-blog-acronyms, I'll give you a "SMH" and a "GTFOH."

Until anyone commenting in the rap community can actually provide a coherent assessment of just what is wrong with this cover (in the context of album covers like Ready to Die and illmatic) then I'm just going to have to label everyone hypocrites. "No Words" is not a sufficient criticism. Neither is calling it an April Fools joke or writing LOL. My favorite description of the cover though? an abomination.

Wow, just wow. The rest of you may have "no words," but I've got at least one, and that's ignorant.

(I will, however concede that the suit is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and the typography a little strange. Overall it's just a tatooed baby--not exactly an abomination.)

(And hey, speaking of Kanye, if he's not being sarcastic, I have to give props for what he wrote about the Carter III cover.)