The 10 Best Songs From Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter’ Series: Critic’s Picks 

It’s officially Lil Wayne week. Weezy is set to return with the sixth installment of arguably rap’s most decorated album series with Tha Carter VI arriving on Friday (June 6). 

Seven years after C5, Wayne hopes to make more history and add to his decorated legacy. The project’s slated to be another star-studded affair with a range of rumored features from Miley Cyrus, Bono, MGK, Wyclef Jean, Andrea Bocelli and more. 

Three decades into a hall-of-fame career, Lil Wayne changed the aesthetic of rappers and the genre’s sound in the 21st century. Take a look at all the “Lil”s in the rap game, the tattoos and dreadlocks, that can be attributed to Weezy’s influence. His intoxicating Auto-Tune-laced rhymes and witty punchlines that seemingly never end ushered in a new archetype of rapper.

“Before I stepped into music, everyone looked a certain way and everyone did a certain thing. Look at me. Now look at music. They all look like me,” he said in 2020. “I love it.”

At the end of every concert, Lil Wayne expresses gratitude to his fans, saying, “I ain’t s–t without you.” But Weezy wouldn’t but the artist he is without Tha Carter series—a staple in his discography and an artifact of hip-hop history. “Welcome back hip-hop, I saved your life,” he raps on Tha Carter 3’s “Dr. Carter.”

Lil Wayne’s prime heading into C3 circa ‘07-’08 was something you had to see to believe. In a genre with goliaths like Kanye West, Jay-Z and Eminem dominating, Weezy stood tall at 5’5”, in a league of his own. At times, his greatness was impossible to measure through sheer commercial numbers, with the droves of leaks and mixtape files being shared online between fans in a pre-streaming world. 

“You scare me, man, every time you spit,” Ye told Wayne on stage at the 2008 BET Awards while referring to Weezy as his “fiercest competition.”

The New Orleans rap deity will take a bow and a well-deserved victory lap on Friday night when he celebrates Tha Carter VI’s arrival with his first headlining solo show at Madison Square Garden. How is that possible?

Billboard sifted through all five installments of Tha Carter and attempted to do the impossible, filing down a list to the 10 best tracks from the acclaimed series. (And a quick honorable mention to “Mirror,” “This is the Carter,” “I Miss My Dawgs,” “Got Money,” “Mona Lisa,” “Fly In” and “Comfortable.”)