Album Review: Tha Carter VI by Lil Wayne

Lil Wayne has spent the better part of 25 years convincing listeners that every studio LP or surprise mixtape might be the moment he “snaps” again, but is his newest work a return to form?

Courtesy of Young Money Records.

Anticipation for the sixth chapter of Tha Carter series makes the uneven path leading here impossible to ignore. Lil Wayne’s catalog once felt like an unbroken escalation, each tape and album stretching his confidence as far as the breath in his chest. We need to remind people of the overarching theme with Weezy, considering his well-documented career, past versus present. Over the last decade, that arc has flattened, often dipping into self-parody, so a reasonable doubt now shadows that excitement for the next chapter. Can he still deliver a front-to-back statement rather than a handful of playlist-proof verses?

Wayne’s solo baptism, Tha Block Is Hot, came in 1999 as a teenager rapping through regional bounce cadences that still leaned on crew call-and-response. Besides the Sqad Up mixtapes he cut in the early ‘00s, you can hear a restless student absorbing every punch-line from Cash Money peers while experimenting with breath control that sometimes slipped off-beat. Even then, his appetite for volume (rap early, rap often) hinted at a longer view. The punch lines were serviceable, but the discipline wasn’t there yet; full songs often coasted on hook repetition more than wordplay.

That changed with 2004’s Tha Carter. His nasal drawl sharpened into a scalpel, and Mannie Fresh’s departure forced Wayne to mold disparate producers into a cohesive sound rather than passively inherit one. “Go DJ” became a shorthand for his new ethos: minimalist drums giving him space to squeeze internal rhymes into almost every bar. The progress felt earned, not gifted, and it set a foundation sturdy enough to survive the relentless mixtape grind that followed. From late 2005 through spring 2007, Wayne attacked instrumentals like a touring jazz soloist searching for fresh changes each night. Tha Carter II planted the “Best Rapper Alive” flag; the Dedication series and Da Drought 3 then proved the claim through sheer repetition and imagination, turning pop hits into raw practice pads and forcing other emcees to chase his vocabulary. One frequently quoted rap blog of the era called Da Drought 3 the embodiment of “athletic rhyme” and placed it atop their decade list; another year-end roundup crowned it the definitive free release of 2007.

The quality control was staggering, with over a hundred songs in eighteen months, and almost no audible fatigue. However, the peak arrived in 2008-09. Tha Carter III balanced pop instinct with chest-tightening pockets, letting blunt hooks sit next to technical verses without either sounding forced. The numbers were historic, but more important was the sense of possibility; he had bent mainstream radio to his idiosyncrasies. No Ceilings followed a year later and kept the mixtape model alive, where he rapped for the love of rapping, stealing beats, and stealing shows. A respected annual music poll later called the tape his sharpest release since the Grammy haul, praising its humor and looseness.

Then the gears began to grind. Rebirth (2010) pursued rap-rock crossover fantasies with clattering guitars that drowned out thin hooks; even sympathetic reviewers admitted that “Prom Queen” sounded like a genre exercise, rather than a song. Around the same time, the pun game grew sloppy. “Weezy F. Baby and the F is for Phenomenal” ignored the dictionary and drew widespread mockery. His incarceration and rushed I Am Not a Human Being project further scattered his focus, leaving half-polished verses beside Auto-Tuned crooning that felt obligatory rather than inspired. Tha Carter IV showed glints of the old muscle—“6 Foot 7 Foot” remains a bar-fest—but the filler piled up (It did give us this classic line: “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna.”). Things bottomed out in 2013 with I Am Not a Human Being II and the infamous Future remix line, “Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till,” which prompted public apologies and lost endorsements. The controversy underscored a broader issue—Wayne’s filter had dissolved, leaving him one tasteless punch line away from undermining each release.

Legal skirmishes with Cash Money only added delay and frustration, turning the long-promised Carter V into a piece of folklore. Yet even in decline, he flashed brilliance. His guest verse on Chance the Rapper’s “No Problem” in 2016 stretched pockets with acrobatic internal rhymes that reminded listeners why other rappers still called him GOAT. “Mona Lisa,” tucked deep inside the eventually liberated Carter V, offered a five-minute narrative sparring match with Kendrick Lamar that stood up to his mid-2000s storytelling. In 2021, he nearly stole “Seeing Green” with casually dense multis that sounded composed yet effortless, and his 2020 “B.B. King Freestyle” revealed a refreshed pen over subdued soul loops.

Still, the albums surrounding those moments (Free Weezy Album, Funeral, assorted No Ceilings sequels) lacked the thematic gravity or consistent editing that defined his prime. Too often, he defaulted to quantity over refinement, releasing sixty-minute tracklists where ten memorable verses hid inside beds of recycled similes. The mixtape circuit that once energized him became less crucial in the streaming era, leaving him trapped between outdated hustle and modern consumption habits. So when we weigh hits against misses, the ledger skews negative after 2010, meaning more projects than classics, more forgettable puns than quotables that shape the culture. Wayne’s talent never vanished, but discipline and quality control did. And sadly, this is what sums up Tha Carter VI.

Granted, there are positives on this album as well, so it’s not all dreadful. When “Welcome to Tha Carter” starts, the hard-hitting drums throw back to classic DJ Premier (even though it’s ONHEL who made the track), and Weezy sounds excellent over it. His wordplay is on full display in the couplet “Man of my word, I stand on my word/Y’all get on my nerves, I get high and land like a bird,” and beneath the bravado, his bars sketch a portrait of a creative life steeped in chemical extremes and hyper-awareness. The follow-up “Bells,” which reworks an LL Cool J classic, is left with a checklist of violent references and drug puns rather than a coherent set of ideas or emotional stakes. He attempts to stake out a gritty street persona, yet it relies almost exclusively on stock imagery of narcotics and gunplay, leaving little room for genuine emotional nuance.

The early guest run—featuring BigXthaPlug and Jay Jones on “Hip-Hop,” and Jelly Roll and Big Sean on “Sharks”—demonstrates how collaborative instincts can be a double-edged sword. BigXthaPlug snarls with conviction on the hook, and Jay Jones delivers with his verse, but Wayne’s annoyance of autotune and “I like the pussy deep dish and when it go squish, squish, squish” barely slices through. Jelly Roll lands a raspy bridge that works in isolation yet sounds imported from an outlaw-country session, and Big Sean’s aggressive punch-in multisyllabics (like the horrid “All my exes miss me 'cause they missin’ out”) don’t mesh well. But Weezy is still forcing some bad lines, including “If niggas not chicken, they tender like/Chick-fil-A on a Christian Day.” Moments like these show the persistent tension where Wayne still loves to share the stage with other rappers, yet the chemistry rarely blossoms into something greater than the sum of its parts. The contrast evokes how his strongest collaborative verses in the past era felt like spontaneous one-upmanship rather than negotiated features, a spirit missing from these rigid, streaming-formatted collaborations.

In the album’s middle third, Wayne begins to explore genre pivots. “Banned from NO” leans into the NOLA bounce reworking “Banned from TV,” yet the bass is so processed and the hook is absolutely brutal that the groove feels colder than intended. “The Days,” built around Bono’s uninspiring hook, courts crossover appeal but never quite shakes the sense that Wayne is rapping on a beat that you would typically find on YouTube as the ‘90s NY Boom Bap Type Beat. “Cotton Candy,” buoyed by the playful deadpan, fares better because 2 Chainz turns the track into an informal verse competition, forcing Wayne to attack the pocket with genuine urgency. Unfortunately, “Flex Up” returns to lumbering hi-hat grids that leave too much negative space, and Wayne fills the gaps with free-association bars about nothing in particular. By this point, the album has begun to resemble a playlist assembled by impulse rather than design.

Another decent spot arrives on “Rari,” featuring Kameron Carter. Father and son share the mic over a polished bounce-driven groove that echoes the spirit of vintage Weezy without carbon copying it. Kameron’s youthful tone pairs fairly with Wayne, who does what he does well with his rapping. Then comes “Maria,” the collaboration rumored for months after Wayne visited Italy. Andrea Bocelli is featured across a reharmonized interpolation of “Ave Maria,” while Wyclef Jean’s verse is certainly not bad, but it’s not memorable. Again, the grand gesture reads better on paper than it lands in sequence. Especially when you hear “Island Holiday” and “If I Played Guitar,” it sounds so out of place that it leans toward a rock influence and subpar singing. There’s nothing wrong with experimenting, but it has to work.

Influence alone cannot disguise those structural flaws, though it still radiates here. Wayne’s elastic metaphors, every-other-bar punch lines, and willingness to abandon rhyme schemes mid-sprint remain thrilling, and younger collaborators echo his cadences in real time. Even so, the record highlights the need for innovation to be framed, as there is nothing to discuss regarding subject matter due to the lack of variety in topics. When Wayne sparred with JAY-Z on “Mr. Carter” or threaded auto-tuned croons through “Lollipop” with the late Static Major, the surrounding songs reinforced each pivot between conceptual and personal tracks. Tha Carter VI piles possibilities on top of one another without that scaffolding so that any fairweather fan can piece coherence together on their own. Where it lies is reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, aka a handful of excellent chapters surrounded by tangents that might delight one listener and exhaust another.

He recovers some cohesion on “Bein Myself,” which reunites him with Mannie Fresh. The beat is surprisingly built around a soul sample instead of the usual kind of stuttering snare fills and bass-keyboard counterpoints that once defined New Orleans bounce beat that you get from Fresh, and Wayne rises to the occasion by trimming the punchline barrage in favor of tight, scene-setting couplets. He recalls hardship and ambition in lines such as “Saw my father whip the cocaine ’til he saw wealth” and asserts his own timeline with “I blew up before y’all niggas was bomb threats.” By magnifying egotism into an almost cartoonish extreme in the following verse, he upends standard rap posturing and reframes personal mythology as a kind of hyper-real satire. The synergy recalls the telepathic chemistry of their peak-era sessions, reminding us that when Wayne aligns with home-grown production, his cadences lock into a physical swing.

Yet the boost is fleeting. “Loki’s Theme” has Wayne riding over a club beat before it transitions into an out-of-place rock track that does absolutely no favors and “Peanuts 2 N Elephant” is a worthy contender for the worst beat of the year and “If I Played Guitar” contains some of the worst bars of the year: “She said, ‘I’m too hot for your ass,’ and now my pants on fire.” But hold on, we’re just scratching the surface. “She’s a man-eater and I was just an appetizer” landed with a thud rather than a spark, because the food metaphors collapse into kitchen-sink banality. Even the clever pivot to antiseptics in “if shit get out of hand, I keep sanitizer” reads less like fresh wit than a last-ditch rhyme pick, shoehorning a rhyme at the expense of meaning. On a technical level, the AABB rhyme couplets give the piece a nursery-rhyme quality that undercuts any attempt at mature introspection.

“Mula Komin In,” featuring Lil Novi, chases rage-rap energy with blown-out 808s, but Wayne’s verse feels phoned-in beside Novi’s chest-beating hook. “Alone In the Studio With My Gun,” a title that suggests diaristic focus, instead serves up an oddly placed party record where MGK sounds awful on the hook and Kodak Black humorously confuses the song order during his verse. By the arrival of “Written History,” the ear has grown numb from constant stylistic pivots, so even the intended finale’s reflective couplets about Wayne’s brush with word salads and his subsequent legacy fail to land with full emotional weight, drowning under useless autotune. Metaphors appear to leap out of a stock relationship shorthand rather than a personal vantage point, and so the track drifts into predictability. In the end, it feels less like a snapshot of romantic turmoil and more like an exercise in ticking off romance tropes one after the other.

Why does such an influential artist continue to struggle with the economy? One answer lies in Wayne’s work ethic. He records compulsively, often producing hundreds of songs per year, a practice that naturally results in uneven quality control. Another factor is the longer game streaming revenue of albums, turning passive plays into chart math, even if listeners rarely finish the entire runtime. Still, those explanations feel partial. Wayne also seems enamored with the idea of constant reinvention, so he packs every session into the final product rather than curating deliberate snapshots. It’s a collage where excellent verses sit beside half-hearted punch-ins, and inspired hook ideas rub shoulders with placeholders that should have died on a studio hard drive. The guest list amplifies the issue. When Wayne pairs with Bono, Andrea Bocelli (although she’s sampled), or even MGK, the cross-genre novelty threatens to eclipse his own voice, and he sometimes responds by over-rapping, stuffing lines until the rhyme schemes buckle under their density.

If bloated albums have become Wayne’s default, the precedent was set before. Tha Carter V sprawled across twenty-three songs, enticing listeners with nostalgia and personal testimony while testing patience with uneven pacing. Two years later, Funeral expanded to twenty-four tracks, ballooning to thirty-two in its deluxe incarnation, a case study in sheer volume that eclipses narrative focus. Against that backdrop, nineteen might seem lean, yet the record still drags because it rarely sustains thematic through-lines. Wayne’s gifts—elastic phrasing, an imagination that flips supermarket aisles into space stations, the audible joy of a rapper who freestyles more novel jokes per bar than most manage in a single verse that deserves an editor. The failure to impose parameters not only dilutes the highs, but also it magnifies every filler hook and stray off-beat ad-lib, drawing unwanted attention to the album’s patchwork fabric.

Looking back across the Carter lineage, the sixth chapter lands somewhere between admirable persistence and missed opportunity. It lacks the airtight construction of Tha Carter II and the cultural impact of Tha Carter III, yet it also avoids the whiplash genre-bait of Rebirth. The frustration is that such clarity keeps slipping through cracks created by filler bars, amounts of filler, and an over-reliance on high-profile cameos. Tha Carter VI confirms that Wayne’s virtues and vices remain entwined. His imagination still converts everyday nouns into punch-line fodder at a pace that few can match, and his voice, weathered yet elastic, stacks syllables with an ease that makes even meandering verses feel conversational.

Yet his refusal, or inability, to edit himself forces listeners to dig for buried gems. Nineteen songs may not rival the scope of some earlier projects, but the album once again requires selective listening to reveal its core. For fans willing to curate their own ten-track version (and calling it a classic on social media for 24 hours), a concise and compelling record lies hidden within the swirl. For everyone else, Tha Carter VI will stand as another example of a titan determined to show every facet of his artistry at once, even when the final mosaic sacrifices cohesion for breadth.

Slightly Below Average (★★½☆☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Welcome to Tha Carter,” “Cotton Candy,” “Bein Myself”