YMMV / Lil Wayne

• Awesome Music: While the lyrics to "IANAHB" may be ridiculously stupid, the backing track is an absolutely beautiful improvised piano piece by ELEW.
• Broken Base: "A Milli" is either one of his best songs or one of his worst, depending on whom you ask. General consensus is that "6 Foot 7 Foot" is an improvement.
• Funny Moments: The intro to "A Milli". It starts with some sparkly synths and cheesy orchestral bombast, before Wayne's croaky voice shouts "YOUNG MONEY!" A super-sparse, raw beat drops and the rest is rap history.
  • After Drake sprained his knee at a concert, Wayne came back onstage and quipped: "This nigga really got a bad leg! I thought that shit was only on the TV show!" This would overlap with Harsher in Hindsight, but fortunately Drake made a full recovery.
  • Him reading a Mean Tweetabout himself on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
  Lil Wayne looks like a crabapple... I don't know what a crabapple is. Fuck all ya (chuckles).
  • Lil Wayne is asked what his favorite food is in an interview. His response? "Pussy." Deadpan serious and all.
• Growing the Beard: While mildly-popular in his native New Orleans, he was frequently overshadowed by fellow Cash Money artists like B.G. and Juvenile early in his career. Somewhere around 2004-2005, his rhyming improved markedly. From 2005-2008, a period in which he released Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III, as well as several well-regarded mixtapes, he had a legitimate case for the title of best rapper alive.
• Ho Yay: With Zac Efron.
  • Much, much more pronounced with Birdman. Case in point: "the kiss". Sadly, this is no longer the case now that Wayne and Birdman have officially fallen out.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Having him do a verse or the hook on a song can result in this. Most notably Playaz Circle's "Duffle Bag Boy" which has what might just be his best hook ever and terrible, terrible verses from the main group.
• Memetic Mutation: Fuck bitches, get money.
  • This video of Lil Wayne trying (and failing) to play a guitar solo on stage quickly became a popular in-joke among the guitar-playing community.
  • "Weezy F. Baby and the F is for..."
  • "Real G's move in silence like lasagna"
  • Comparing his appearance to an alien or how he shockingly resembles Whoopi Goldberg.
  • Bisexual! That means two!^Explanation Mannie Fresh's odd ad-lib at the start of "Fresh", in reference to the No Ceilings 2 mixtape. Replacing the number 'two' with 'bisexual' is an in-joke among Lil' Wayne fans as a result
• Misattributed Song: Many of his freestyles of then-popular rap songs off his mixtapes are better known than their original, especially when those songs are by rappers who are either one-hit-wonders or had completely fallen off everyone's radar.
• Nightmare Fuel: "I Feel Like Dying" from his mix tape The Carter III Mixtape is this. On top of the very unsettling beat with the repeated lyrics "Only once the drugs are done, I feel like dying" with Wayne's haunting verses about drug dependency, it's often spoken as one of his best and most uncomfortable songs ever. And that's not even coming with the urban legend of it connected to Satanic backwards messaging behind it.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The song "Karate Chop" with Future would have been seen as another trap song if it wasn't for his highly offensive verse "beat that pussy up like Emmett Till" ^note  Emmett Till was an African-American teenager from Chicago, Illinois who was brutally beaten to death by two white men in Mississippi while visiting family after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store, which was one of the leading moments to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s., which angered his living family members, which led to his verse being highly censored in current prints of the song.
• The Scrappy: Within Young Money, Gudda Gudda is considered this because of his lack of a flow, stupid name and over reliance on half rhymes ("She don't even wonder/She know she bad/And I got her, nigga/Grocery bag")
• Seasonal Rot: Around 2009, a year after the release of Tha Carter III and his mixtape No Ceilings, the quality of his lyrics and projects took a nosedive off a cliff. While he did release some quality tracks and projects every once in a while, the majority of his songs after those works were full of auto-tune, formulaic song structure, immature and cliched rap topics and lyrics being composed of nothing but bragging about pussy, money, bitches, drugs, and jewelry, without having the wit or cleverness that his earlier projects had; and the less said about his rock album Rebirth the better.
• Sequelitis:
  • Tha Carter IV, while certainly not horrible (and indeed having a few well-regarded songs such as "MegaMan", "6 Foot 7 Foot", "How to Love", and "Intro/Interlude/Outro"), has received a lukewarm reception as compared to the previous Carter albums.
  • Dedication 3 and No Ceilings 2 are vastly inferior to their highly acclaimed predecessors in every single way.
• Sequel Displacement:
  • Tha Carter II and especially Tha Carter III are more acclaimed and recognizable than the original.
  • Yes, Da Drought 3 is actually the third installment of a series of mixtapes he released during the early 2000s. Justified, as those mixtapes are very obscure and were released before the peak of his fame.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Love Me" is similar to Kirko Bangz's "Drank in my Cup".
• Tearjerker: "Get Over". "Tie My Hands".
  • Three words: "How. To. Love."
  • Many songs off Tha Carter V like the intro song "Miss You Dwayne", in which his mother is crying over his achievements on the phone, and "Let it All Work Out", in which Lil Wayne describes the time he tried (and thankfully failed) to kill himself when he was 12 years old.
  • "I Feel Like Dying" is considered to be his most depressing song, and it shows, from it eerie sample and instrumental to it rather bleak lyrics about suicide and drug addiction.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: More like They Wasted a Perfectly Good Rapper, but saying that Cory Gunz's talent was all but completely wasted is an overstatement. Despite his technicality and being the most talented of the Young Money roster, his entire career on the label was spend being a glorified feature artist on many of Wayne's projects and on Young Money compilation albums.
• Vindicated by History: It was crazy to believe that Wayne was once seen as everything wrong with rap music in the late 2000s/early 2010s. A combination of his oversaturation and his quality of his lyricism and albums declining in general was the reason why so many people shitted on him and frequently called him a "trash" rapper that they will usually top on many worst rappers of all time lists, as evident in an out-of-date user-based Top Worst Rappers List on the website TheTopTens. Hate towards Wayne is all but non-existent by the end of the 2010s due how many modern day rappers Lil Wayne has influenced. Most of his music, particularly those released in 2004-08, has been better appreciated than it was back in the day.