http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfvAmEPqvBU

Hey, did you see Wale last night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon? The homegrown rapper performed “Lotus Flower Bomb” along with crooner Miguel and Late Night house band The Roots. The rapper’s had luck, in the last six months, with low-key for the ladies ballads (see this song and the earlier hit “That Way”), and you can’t deny his talent for them. Still, in his recent City Paper treatise on all things Wale, Andrew Noz picked apart even this aspect of the rapper:

Wale’s romantic writing can be troublesome, or at least goofy, if you’re not the object of his affection. He’s the inexplicably successful pickup artist whose pandering sweet talk means everything to its intended target while everyone else in the room gags on its sleaziness. It doesn’t help that he delivers these paeans alongside the more blatantly off-putting sex raps that populate other parts of the album. You’d think any progress he’s made as an LL Cool J-esque lady’s man would be negated once he says something like, “She so stingy with vagina/but why it open when a nigga get to shinin’?”

So yeah.