Lil Wayne
"A Milli" on loop, free mixtapes on every hard drive, and a rapper calling himself the best alive before most of the country had caught up. Tha Carter III sold a million copies in a week in 2008, and for a moment nobody argued.
Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. was born in New Orleans on September 27, 1982, discovered by Birdman in 1993 and signed to Cash Money Records at 11. He rapped in the duo B.G.'z with B.G. and then, from 1997, in the Hot Boys with B.G., Juvenile and Turk, the youngest member at 14, and showed up on the chorus of "Bling Bling" and the Juvenile hit "Back That Azz Up." His solo debut, Tha Block Is Hot, released November 2, 1999, when he was 17, reached number three and went platinum within a month. Lights Out and 500 Degreez went gold but could not match it.
Tha Carter, released June 29, 2004, with Mannie Fresh on most of the beats, changed the trajectory: its cover introduced the dreadlocks, "Go D.J." became his first mainstream hit, and on its first single, "Bring It Back," he began calling himself the best rapper alive. Tha Carter II sold 238,000 copies in its first week in December 2005. Then, instead of a follow-up, came the mixtapes. Dedication 2 with DJ Drama in 2006 carried "Georgia Bush," his Hurricane Katrina critique; Da Drought 3 in 2007 was a free download of Wayne rapping over everybody else's hits, and Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard ranked it among the best albums of the year. Guest verses on "Make It Rain," "We Takin' Over" and "Duffle Bag Boy" made him inescapable, and by the end of 2007 MTV voters named him the Hottest MC in the Game, The New Yorker its rapper of the year, and GQ its workaholic of the year.
Tha Carter III leaked so badly that it was delayed and partly reissued as The Leak EP, but when it finally arrived on June 10, 2008, it sold over a million copies in its first week, the first album to do so since 50 Cent's The Massacre. "Lollipop," drenched in Auto-Tune and featuring Static Major, who had died two weeks before its release, spent five weeks at number one and became the best-selling digital single in the world that year; "A Milli," on a Bangladesh beat, made the top ten and later landed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. The album finished as 2008's best seller, and at the 2009 Grammys, with eight nominations, the most of anyone that year, Wayne won four, including Best Rap Album.
A rap-rock album, Rebirth, and an eight-month jail sentence followed in 2010, and his Young Money label went on to launch Drake and Nicki Minaj. In 2012 he passed Elvis Presley for the most Hot 100 entries by a male artist, with 109.
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