Lil Wayne - Tha Carter V (2018) Hi Res

It could have been his emotional swansong, and much of this long-delayed record is an elegiac homage to Lil Wayne’s outlier status as an elder statesman of hip-hop. Yet he cheapens himself on ‘Tha Carter V’

Dwayne Carter Jr.’s long-delayed ‘Tha Carter V’ begins with a monologue from his mother, Jacida Carter. Entitled ‘I Love You Dwayne’, it opens with an emotional Jacida saying, “Lil Wayne, mama proud of you – you done come so far.” She continues, “Thank the lord, because I know you have been through a lot that I don’t even know about.” It’s true that Wayne has had a rough – well – near-decade since he won four Grammys in 2009. Overall, he’s graced the Billboard Hot 100 138 times, scored three Number One albums and sold more than 17.2 million records in America alone (more than 100 million worldwide). In recent years, though, he’s been mired in legal wrangles with his mentor Birdman’s Cash Money label – hence the four-year delay for this record – battled addiction with codeine and suffered a series of very serious seizures.

His career’s been on the slide, too. Poor reviews and diminishing commercial returns (it’s been five years since his last official studio album, ‘I Am Not A Human Being II’, which he described as his “bum-ass album”, reached Number Two on the US charts) mean he’s been overshadowed by his own protégés, Nicki Minaj and Drake, who’ve redefined hip-hop as pop music. But Wayne doesn’t sound hungry on ‘Tha Carter V’. He sounds cynical and weary, a tone that’s often well-suited to a record on which he looks back on his past, surveying the distance he’s travelled, and seems to shake his head in disbelief. There’s clip of Barack Obama saying, “They might think they’ve got a pretty good jumpshot, or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne.” That’s how famous Wayne managed to become.