had a rapper at the top of the game fallen so low. Following a conviction on weapons charges after a July 2007 arrest, he was sentenced to serve eight months on Rikers Island.

But it was New York's tough gun laws that eventually landed him in one of the nation's most notorious correctional facilities. 'I do what I wanna do.' That mentality would eventually catch up with him: He racked up drug possession charges in Arizona, Atlanta, even an arrest in Idaho. Indeed, the kid had heart: He was a gangsta, he told Couric, but one mannerable and Southern enough to respectfully address her as 'Miss Katie.' 'I don't take nothing from no one,' he added. Raised in the crime-infested New Orleans neighborhood of Hollygrove, Wayne had already survived a self-inflicted gunshot at 12 that struck just shy of his heart. He'd just released his sixth solo studio album, Tha Carter III, cementing his image as rap's styrofoam-cup toting Martian with the codeine-coated flow. ' When Lil Wayne uttered those infamous words to Katie Couric in his 2009 interview on CBS, the 'best rapper alive' was living his best life. 27 - Wayne's 36th birthday - along with a decade's worth of baggage.

Tha Carter V is scheduled to arrive the night of Sept. Today, after years of rumor and speculation, the case was closed in a message from the man himself. After years of creative, financial and legal struggles with his industry daddy Bryan 'Baby' Williams, the rapper reached a settlement this summer freeing him from his longtime label Cash Money and clearing the way for him to release the album fans have awaited since 2011, when the last installment of his Carter series fell on ambivalent ears. But in the time since Lil Wayne's late-2000s breakthrough, when platinum albums and a flood of mixtapes tipped him into cultural ubiquity, nothing has done as much to keep his legend alive as the music he didn't release.

New Music Lil Wayne's 'Tha Carter V' Arrives - Late, But Not Worse For Wearįor a half-decade or more, he stood as hip-hop's tatted-up anomaly, the self-professed monster who ate rappers for breakfast while inhabiting a universe of his own creation.

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