when did lil wayne the carter 1 come out

Most of the critics who’ve gone ahead and reviewed this record are already at the bottom. If you’re salivating for the album-as-Generational-Event - a collective moment when the rap community queues up outside of record stores to hail its new king - then your hopes are headed for the waterfall of disappointment. Or at least, Lil Wayne has a vast enough imagination to make one wonder where the drugs kick in. The short verdict is yes, and the long answer probably involves drugs.

Is it official? Do we have a nominee? Or the more immediate question: Is the record worth buying? So chances are, you’ve gathered here to find out or argue about whether or not Lil Wayne can now be called The Best Rapper Alive. Apparently, his excellent performances on mixtapes like Da Drought 3 and Dedication 2 didn’t resolve the best rapper question adequately enough. Yet for whatever reason - anti-Southern bias, anti-mixtape bias, something - each consecutive mixtape only raised the stakes for his next “official” release. Then things went bonkers, and the young work-a-holic unleashed, by my reckoning, 42 mixtapes in the span of three or four years, depending on how you count the overlap. A few years later, he released Tha Carter II, his last RIAA-approved, in-stores record, upon which the Napoleonic five-foot-four New Orleanian both emulated Jay-Z and usurped him by audaciously calling himself “the best rapper alive.” To zip through a backstory that is gradually calcifying into legend, Lil Wayne was once the lowly Onomatopoeia Contributor in a short-lived boy band called the Hot Boyz - his talents trended towards peculiar noises (“bling bling”, “scrrr!”), and sing-songy codas (“drop it like its hot”, “loud pipes, big rims, woadie that’s my life”). In one signature moment, that kind of dorky wrinkle in time foolery sums up everything that’s baffling, bogus, fascinating, and frustrating about the album that was all but teed up to be the hip-hop record of a generation - a generation that has indeed watched Lil Wayne get better, much better, in time. It’s a difficult thought to transcribe from Lil Wayne-ese to HTML, but if you ask me, the most mind-boggling lyric on Lil Wayne’s hotly anticipated new record goes like this: “Watch.

When did lil wayne the carter 1 come out