A little bit too much sizzurp

There has always been something different about Lil Wayne.

As we watched him go from d-boy to Hot Boy, from Birdman-kisser to rapper-eater, from Dwayne Michael Carter to Weezy F. Baby, the one constant was Wayne’s will to be weird.

His bizarrely brilliant sizzurp- and Swisher-fueled rhymes laced lines of coke-rap with Outkast-like extraterrestrialisms that made him both widely embraced and wildly enigmatic. All of this made for an unprecedented mixtape rampage in the middle of the decade that culminated in something of a perfect moment when 2008’s “Tha Carter III” garnered critical acclaim, chart-topping status and a Grammy.

Now, more than three years later, Weezy returns to the “Tha Carter” franchise following two solid mixtapes, two terrible albums and one infamous jail term.

But “Tha Carter IV” is largely absent of his former eccentricities. Those have been replaced with an onslaught of punchless, lazy lines such as the album’s opener, “Man, fuck them bitches and them hoes/Them nigga pussies, camel toes.” It epitomizes Wayne’s attitude, post-“III”: “Fuck you, fuck you and you, and, oh yeah, here’s a hashtag rap.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that “IV” sounds largely complacent. It’s the musings of a man who has become satisfied with his level of success and, more recently, thrown around talk of retirement.

His electric moments are few and far between here. More unfortunately, they’re mostly on tracks we’ve heard, such as the “A Milli” reincarnate “6 Foot 7 Foot,” the Banana-song-sampling single from last December where we heard Wayne spit fire (“Life is the bitch, and death is her sister/Sleep is the cousin, what a fuckin’ family picture”) over a booming Bangladesh beat before giving way to Cory Gunz for an unimpressive mess of bars.

This is a common thread on “IV”: Wayne getting out of the way for other people.

On two different tracks, he gets stellar guest spots from the likes of Tech N9ne, Nas, Busta Rhymes, Bun B, Shyne and (strangely uncredited) Andre 3000 while Wayne elects to stand aside.

He’s no longer trying to be the Best Rapper Alive — in fact, he’s content with not even being the Best Rapper on His Own Album.

He’s most alive when swiping at his perpetual frenemy, Jay-Z, on “It’s Good,” with the highly publicized response to Hov’s “baby money” diss: “Talkin’ ‘bout baby money, I got your baby money/ Kidnap your bitch, get that ‘how much you love your lady?’ money.” Here he partners with Jadakiss and Drake with a strung-out southern beat. They seem to invigorate Weezy, much like Rick Ross on “John,” another single.

Unfortunately, for every one of those, there’s a track like “How to Hate,” a prequel of sorts to the smash hit, “How to Love,” complete with a bubblegum T-Pain hook that’s absolutely been sitting in someone’s closet since 2007.

If we were hoping for a glance into prison life, we don’t get it from Wayne, but Drake manages to connect the Riker’s Island prison to bad bitches and back again, letting Wayne shy away from anything too crucial or ambitious.

So “Tha Carter IV” adds very little (except record sales, impressively) to the artistic legacy of Lil Wayne. It stands as a frustrating reminder of the maniacally productive rapper we once knew and a new chapter to what has still become a fascinating career arc.