The road of hope and disappointment to the 2025 Super Bowl has left the label executives wondering how they could make Lil Wayne’s pussy punchlines more palatable beyond a demographic who just discovered the human anatomy in health class. Considering that this year’s Super Bowl took place in New Orleans, it felt like an appropriate stage for Wayne to return to celebrate the glory of Cash Money and his indomitable commercial success, influence, and legacy. Yet, Wayne hasn’t aged gracefully in recent years. His talents and reputation have been a gift and a curse; for someone who records so much music, he can’t remember all of his lyrics without a teleprompter, and as far as his Madison Square Garden launch party is concerned, he believes that the glory days justify two-hour delays before he touches the stage. Does he actually believe the millennials who want to hear his mixtape cuts don’t feel more entitled to their sleep schedule than his showmanship?
All of these things are beyond the point, but they lay the groundwork for what we know about Lil Wayne: the ratio of hits to misses in the past decade is just about equal at this point. And when he comes through with a new instalment in the coveted The Carter series—inarguably one of the most acclaimed album series in hip-hop—it sounds like an attempt to compensate for how the last year and some change transpired in his hope for the Super Bowl stage. An artist who hopes to transcend the narrative that hip-hop shaped for him and translate it to an audience that will only acknowledge Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time because that’s the only rapper they know.
In his 40s, there should be more of a desire to find his truth as an elder statesman, in the same way we’ve seen with Nas and Jay-Z in the past decade. Just a moment or two that truly reflects how the dynamics of his age interact with the world around him. But it’s still Wayne’s World—only the number next to Tha Carter has changed. However, there’s certainly more intention surrounding some of the early production choices, especially as it pertains to “King Carter” and “Welcome to Tha Carter,” an intro that embodies a sort of cathartic release and ease that bounces between punchy wordplay, intricate rhyme schemes, and classic Wayne non-sequiturs that honor a medicine cabinet’s worth of substances and a brothel of hedonism that fueled a 30-plus-year career. He pings between owing taxes and concierge-serviced homes within the same breath, which, at the very least, doesn’t make this sound like some record out the vault that was dusted off and placed into sequence—it actually reflects on some of the struggles he’s faced in recent times, rapping, “I know the feds' cameras observe 'cause the cash is absurd / I mean, the house so fuckin' massive, I just added concierge.” Tying it all together is Angel Aponte, who leads the choral ensemble allowing for Wayne’s grandiose entrance.
But as consuming as the entrance is, that momentum falls short across the entirety of the album. Tha Carter VI slowly becomes a confusing unraveling of a cloudy ambition—to either revisit the glory days, establish itself as a legacy project, create an intergenerational bridge between Gen Alpha and their grandparents, or test crossover waters as if he didn’t learn much from his experience touring with blink-182 after the last instalment of Tha Carter series arrived—each goal undermining the others instead of coalescing into a vision. Regarding the latter, songs like “Island Holiday,” a horrible rendition of Weezer’s “Island in the Sun,” and “If I Played Guitar,” sound like leftovers from Lil Wayne's Rebirth sessions. Considering the outcome of that rock album—and why it should’ve been locked in a safe and buried in the backyard—it makes you wonder who inside of the Republic Records/Young Money building was responsible for approving this. That’s especially true of “Peanuts N Elephants”—a wonky, cartoonishly awful song produced by Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda that would’ve been better suited for a video game score before the first PlayStation came out. Yet, going back to the executives, it’s clear that the namesake carries more weight than the quality of whatever goes out the door. Bono’s inclusion on “The Days” feels just as forced as when U2’s Songs Of Innocence inexplicably appeared on everyone’s Apple products without permission. And while it does provide some of Wayne’s most introspective bars on this project, the rawness of his observations of America, aging, and death feel drowned out by the over-polished production.
As many shortcomings as there are across its 19 songs, the most forward-thinking moments truly arrive with the assistance of his sons, Kameron Carter and Lil Novi. Between interviewing Jim Jones and Busta Rhymes’s sons over the years, I’ve realized that the vets are often clocked out of this rap sh*t as soon as the cheque clears and have very little interest (or time) to figure out who the next up is. Their kids are typically the ones helping them keep an ear to the streets. “Rari” ft. Kameron Carter truly sounds like a flashback to the height of SoundCloud rap in 2016—a vibey, DIY-leaning bop that’s more appropriate to run in the background while playing Call of Duty than anything you want to revisit out of choice (without the assistance of drugs). Then there’s Young Money’s next-up and the Carter household’s resident Playboi Carti fan who jumps on “Mula Coming In,” which similarly feels like it belongs in the previous building blocks of the current underground soundscape. They aren’t terrible, per se, but there’s a time and place for everything. And it feels like both of these songs would’ve been better suited for the next Young Money compilation rather than infringing on their dad’s attempt to salvage a narrative that’s been working against him for the past year.
If much of Tha Carter VI is clouded by confusion, a few tracks still manage to cut through and deliver the kind of magic only Lil Wayne can. “Hip-Hop” with BigXthaPlug and Jay Jones feels like a flash-in-the-pan brilliance of Wayne’s hitmaking prowess, where the odd vocal inflections and wordplay make for a magical pairing. Then there are songs like “Cotton Candy” with 2 Chainz that strike their magnetic chemistry on wax—it’s these two songs that feel particularly welcome in a sea of skip-worthy records. However, there are other moments where Wayne’s penchant for nostalgia is far more effective than the aforementioned Weezer cover. In fact, in his 40s, songs like “Bells” and the Mannie Fresh-produced “Bein Myself” feel like the most appropriate attempts to reach for that nostalgic factor. The former, a rendition of LL Cool J’s original record, brings a modernized twist to the classic with looming 808s holding the verses, which Wayne rips through. “Bein Myself,” however, brings a soulful and grounded production by Fresh, and it’s still amazing to hear how neither have missed a step with each other—even if they don’t collaborate as often as we’d like.
The thing about Tha Carter VI is we’re left with little curiosity about where Lil Wayne could go next. For an album that was intended to fortify one of the greatest legacies in American music, there’s nothing about this project that truly captures the zany brilliance and unorthodox free-flowing structure that made his initial claim to being the “Greatest Rapper Alive” a believable one. These days, we’re seeing Wayne in this awkward middle ground of his career, where Twitter effectively downsized his legacy to being less-than-Super Bowl Halftime Show-worthy and the music industry is still putting him on a pedestal as hip-hop’s Golden Child. But that’s what ultimately makes the final song, “Written History,” as effective as it is. It’s these moments—much like his verse on DJ Khaled’s “God Did”—where he rightfully reflects on the transcendence of his legacy and how it mirrors practically every fraction of hip-hop right now. Wayne remains a GOAT in his own right, but albums like Tha Carter VI do little to convince the rest of us that what he said on Tha Carter II or Dedication 2 still holds the same weight as it once did. There’s a lack of ambition and hunger to retain the throne—but there’s satisfaction in knowing that Lil Wayne finds some solace in existing within an ecosystem of hip-hop that he helped create.
