Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III - Volume 1 (2LP) [CASH MONEY/UNIVERSAL MOTOWN]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set gives the opening eight tracks of Tha Carter III room to breathe across four sides. The album sold over a million copies in its first week and won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and "A Milli" won Best Rap Solo Performance.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Volume 1 of the album's two-volume vinyl edition

About the album

By 2008 Lil Wayne had spent a couple of years flooding the streets with mixtapes and guest verses, calling himself the best rapper alive and daring anyone to argue. Tha Carter III, delayed and leaked and endlessly hyped, was the album that had to prove it, and it did.

"3 Peat" opens with a victory lap, and "Mr. Carter" brings in Jay-Z for a passing-of-the-torch summit. "A Milli" is built from little more than a looped vocal snippet and a booming beat from Bangladesh, and Wayne rides it like a man with nowhere else to be. "Got Money" with T-Pain went top ten, "Comfortable" slows things down with Babyface and a smooth Kanye West production, and "Phone Home" finds him in full extraterrestrial mode. "Tie My Hands" with Robin Thicke is a heartfelt song about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a sombre turn from a rapper usually busy having fun.

Rolling Stone later put the album on its list of the 500 greatest of all time. And in "Dr. Carter" Wayne plays a surgeon reviving ailing rhymes over a Swizz Beatz beat; we can't vouch for his medical licence, but the patients all pulled through.

Also at Kops: more Lil Wayne on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Cash Money / Universal Motown (cat# B0011671-01), the 2008 album.