It’s officially Lil Wayne week. Weezy is set to return with the sixth installment of arguably rap’s most decorated album series with Tha Carter VI arriving on Friday (June 6).
Seven years after C5, Wayne hopes to make more history and add to his decorated legacy. The project’s slated to be another star-studded affair with a range of rumored features from Miley Cyrus, Bono, MGK, Wyclef Jean, Andrea Bocelli and more.
Three decades into a hall-of-fame career, Lil Wayne changed the aesthetic of rappers and the genre’s sound in the 21st century. Take a look at all the “Lil”s in the rap game, the tattoos and dreadlocks, that can be attributed to Weezy’s influence. His intoxicating Auto-Tune-laced rhymes and witty punchlines that seemingly never end ushered in a new archetype of rapper.
“Before I stepped into music, everyone looked a certain way and everyone did a certain thing. Look at me. Now look at music. They all look like me,” he said in 2020. “I love it.”
At the end of every concert, Lil Wayne expresses gratitude to his fans, saying, “I ain’t s–t without you.” But Weezy wouldn’t but the artist he is without Tha Carter series—a staple in his discography and an artifact of hip-hop history. “Welcome back hip-hop, I saved your life,” he raps on Tha Carter 3’s “Dr. Carter.”
Lil Wayne’s prime heading into C3 circa ‘07-’08 was something you had to see to believe. In a genre with goliaths like Kanye West, Jay-Z and Eminem dominating, Weezy stood tall at 5’5”, in a league of his own. At times, his greatness was impossible to measure through sheer commercial numbers, with the droves of leaks and mixtape files being shared online between fans in a pre-streaming world.
“You scare me, man, every time you spit,” Ye told Wayne on stage at the 2008 BET Awards while referring to Weezy as his “fiercest competition.”
The New Orleans rap deity will take a bow and a well-deserved victory lap on Friday night when he celebrates Tha Carter VI’s arrival with his first headlining solo show at Madison Square Garden. How is that possible?
Billboard sifted through all five installments of Tha Carter and attempted to do the impossible, filing down a list to the 10 best tracks from the acclaimed series. (And a quick honorable mention to “Mirror,” “This is the Carter,” “I Miss My Dawgs,” “Got Money,” “Mona Lisa,” “Fly In” and “Comfortable.”)
Weezy didn’t waste any time getting busy on Tha Carter II, as he comes out of the gate guns blazing on opener “Tha Mobb.” He flexes being a legend in the game even if he never released a song, and compares himself to being the ocean, while other rappers are mere tuna swimming around his domain. Being a basketball savant, there’s even a shrewd reference to NBA veteran Bill Cartwright, who retired a decade prior to C2. Wayne could do it all.
Wayne’s torrid 2007 mixtape run and array of leaks that could be another rapper’s best single flooded the market and set the table for Tha Carter III. Expectations couldn’t be higher, and a scorching Weezy delivered a smash that radio could wrap its arms around featuring a lift from the late Static Major. “Lollipop” is Wayne’s lone song as a lead artist to top the Hot 100 and earned him a diamond plaque.
Mannie Fresh helmed Tha Carter nearly exclusively behind the, boards as he supplied the jet fuel for every Cash Money artist to take off. Both MF’s and Weezy’s gifts are on full display with the twitchy “Go DJ,” which notched Tunechi his first major solo hit and led the way to Wayne becoming the commercial titan he’d emerge as in the second half of the 2000s. “18, how I’m living?/ Youngin, show that Bentley,” he raps.
Lil Wayne long believed he was the “Best Rapper Alive,” and it wasn’t long after Tha Carter II until the rest of the world started to catch up. Weezy flexes on the competition over an Iron Maiden interpolation, and uses clever wordplay to plant his championship flag in ground. “Best Rapper Alive” went on to be a Wayne fan-favorite deep cut since the track was never made a single or had a video — but the New Orleans legend used the rest of the decade as his canvas to paint a masterpiece and lend credence to his bold claims.
Drake gets called up to the big leagues with his Tha Carter series debut, and the 6 God makes it count. Drizzy handles chorus duties, exhaling over the smoky T-Minus production, which clears the lane for Wayne, who lights up the scoreboard to lead Young Angel and Young Lion to victory, with plenty of punchy one-liners. “I tried to pay attention, but attention paid me/ Haters can’t see me, nose-bleed seats,” he spews on the C4 standout. “She Will” reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and topped the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.
Wayne set the stage for C2 by setting off the alarms that he was gearing up for a hip-hop takeover with the blaring “Fireman.” He put out the blazes of rhymers around him, but he would remain scorching for years to come. A pop-friendly hit in 2005, “Fireman” cracked the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40, peaking at No. 32.
In the same vein as “A Milli,” which was also produced by Bangladesh, Weezy lets the chopper sing without a chorus, and spins a hit out of his rapid-fire flow. “6 Foot 7 Foot” is filled with memorable bars, as Wayne somehow rhymes “charisma” with “vodka spritzer.” The feverish, Cory Gunz-assisted track set the bar for Tha Carter IV to close out 2010, and cracked the Hot 100’s top 10.
Only Lil Wayne’s lyrical brilliance could turn the weather’s seasons into his biggest haters. Weezy and Jay-Z had a competitive relationship, as they pushed each other’s pen to greatness and metaphorically attempted to KO one another with every punch line. With Wayne at his peak, Hov walked into a [Young] lion’s den, and Tunechi got the best of him on “Mr. Carter” with home court advantage.
A Carter series fan favorite, the “Hustler Music/Money on My Mind” video aeshtetically defined the C2 era for Wayne, as nobody could forget Weezy spitting bars around the city in a pink camouflage Bape jacket and matching kicks. Wayne slows the pace down here, and his hazy flow does the rest. With a catchy chorus built around Weezy powering through life’s obstacles to stack paper through any means, “Hustler Musik” has aged about as well as any Wayne song over the years.
Songs without choruses aren’t supposed to be hits, but “A Milli” finds Wayne leaving earth for three minutes with hard-hitting bar one after another. Who could forget the POV music video, following Weezy around a chaotic tour of the video set? Bangladesh’s beat is still one of the hardest-hitting in modern hip-hop history, and “What’s a goon to a goblin” and “You like a b—h with no a–, you ain’t got s–t” are couplets that remain memorable staples of Weezy’s repertoire to this day.