

That’s what I meant.” After we talk some more, he admits that the legal wrangling has been weighing on his mind. As for the “I am a prisoner” tweet from December, he tries to play it off with a sex joke at first: “I love being a prisoner in some pussy. “That’s a legal matter, homeboy,” he says. But Wayne is just waking up and is understandably prickly about discussing the lawsuit. Miami time when Rolling Stone reaches the rapper by phone last week.

“I’m super-numb to it, to tell you the truth.” But that relationship has broken down, perhaps irreparably. Wayne tells Rolling Stone that he and Birdman are no longer on speaking terms. “His rhymes, once the most inventive in the genre, have been badly desiccated.Lil Wayne has been one of Cash Money’s flagship stars since he signed with the label at age 12, and for years he saw Williams as a father figure, frequently dubbing himself “Birdman Jr.” on record. “When he has released music, it’s been ill-advised and coolly received,” Jon Caramanica wrote in the New York Times (paywall) of 2016 collaborative album with 2 Chainz. Under pressure from his younger, more intellectual rivals and fighting his own label, Wayne’s sure touch also seemed to desert him. Future dropped two different albums in consecutive weeks last year-and have both go to number one. Whereas Weezy was once a pioneer of flooding the world with music, he was now being drowned by the tidal wave from everyone else. In fact, the public has demonstrated an unlimited appetite for new music as streaming took over. In 2009, 50 Cent criticized Wayne:”He makes a lot of records and I think he’s gonna exhaust the public with his sound.” He was wrong. Wayne was struggling with a culture that was shifting again, towards different kinds of rap and different kinds of rappers. He skated a lot. From the heights of rap superstardom, the only way was down.īy the release of Tha Carter IV in 2011, Wayne was overshadowed by proteges Nicki Minaj and Drake, both of whom were adept at creating meme-worthy music perfect for social media. And just as people were asking whether Lil Waybe was, in fact, the best rapper in the world, Tha Carter III was released in 2008 and sold 1 million copies in its first week, one the last albums to do those kind of numbers. At the height of his powers, he was able to do anything he wanted.

LIL WAYNE FREE WEEZY ALBUM ITUNES SERIES
He followed up with an endless series of free mixtapes, remixes, and freestyles. His rise came with the sequel in 2005, when his cocaine rhymes, increasingly intricate flows, and weird metaphors started to bring respect.

Wayne’s first Tha Carter album came out in 2004, when people still bought albums on iTunes. Every week, there is something new-and it’s not that good. After a snap decision is made on its brilliance in the first week, the hype soon moves on to the next amazing new project. Few can seem to find a way to hold on to the attention. Hardly any of the songs from those albums by huge artists (again, bar Drake) can be found on Apple Music’s new daily charts of the top 100 songs played in the US. Drake’s Scorpion, which had the most traditional release of a long tease with three radio-friendly lead singles, is doing the best out of all of those early summer releases-it is still at no. Would these albums be appreciated more if they were spaced further apart and people were prepared for them? Quite possibly. As charts are now heavily built on streaming, this is less a traditional test of sales than a measure of how much people are still listening to an album. The Carters are currently at 64, one behind Drake’s 2011 album Take Care. West’s Ye album, for example, debuted in mid-June at number one but is now already at 78. It also may have been the most irrelevant. Very little of the music seems to have much staying power. This could have been the most action-packed summer in rap history, a veritable Avengers: Infinity War of hip-hop asserting the genre’s dominance of popular music. That was just the months of May and June 2018. And soon, Drake released his latest LP, Scorpion. In the midst of that unexpected burst of dragon energy, Beyoncé and Jay-Z surprised everyone with their own joint album. None had any singles or hype before they dropped-a now common trope to draw attention to new albums. Kanye West kicked off the summer by releasing five different albums on five consecutive Fridays, including his own Ye album and a new Nas album (which, also, once upon a time, would have been big news on its own). It’s almost impossible to keep track of who has released what. Lil Wayne’s new album comes after an insanely bountiful summer of hip-hop.
