Over the past couple of years, he's given away more worthwhile free music online than most artists of his stature ever release officially. 'I pay my dues, you keep the difference.'Īs the major music industry continues to wheeze and splinter, Lil Wayne's spitball marketing plan for C3 is an unprecedented masterstroke. Instead of hiding his bootleg-bred quirks in anticipation of the big-budget spotlight, he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package that's as weird as it wants to be he eventually finds his guitar but keeps the strumming in check. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. Now, nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, we get Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. And, opposed to the typical rap flame-out trajectory, Wayne got better- and stranger- with each album. While everyone else on the day's bill- from Alicia Keys to Kanye West- filled their shortened, festival-style sets with hits and finely-tailored theatrics, the audience's most anticipated act took the opportunity get his Guitar for Dummies on Lil Wayne is, as he likes to say, 'different.' Always has been.Įarmarked as a gifted elementary school student in New Orleans, he became the token prodigy of his hometown's Cash Money clique at the age of 16, spitting pipsqueak gangsterisms over skittering Mannie Fresh beats. 'That's not a chord or anything!' Still, she recorded Wayne in all his tatted-up Tracy Chapman glory for YouTube posterity just the same. 'Is he really playing the guitar right now?' giggled a teenage girl. The fact was evident at this year's Summer Jam, when he spent two and a half interminable minutes noodling and crooning all by his lonesome while a stadium full of New York's most devout hip-hop fans looked on bewildered.

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