So how ’bout this, folks?
Lil’ Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” LP, which was released this past Tuesday, sold nearly half a million copies in it’s first day of sales. It’s on pace to sell 850-950,000 copies in it’s first week, which would make it the biggest first week sales of 2008, the biggest first week sales for an album in almost a year (since Kanye West’s “Graduation” last September), and would place it 4th on the list of biggest hip-hop first weeks, behind the aforementioned Kanye West album and the second and third Eminem albums. It would also immediately make it the 4th biggest selling album of 2008 to date, behind Jack Johnson, Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys.
So I ask you, reading public, what is it about Lil’ Wayne that makes him so special. ‘Cause, I’ll be real here. This guy’s been around for a decade and some change and has made not one single song that’s moved me. While I don’t mind his guest appearances on others’ records-most of the time (he ruined the remix of Usher’s “Love in This Club”, he’s always outshined by whatever artist he appears with. I also raise an eyebrow at his sudden transformation to “Best Rapper Alive”, simply because a) as long as Rakim, KRS-ONE, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Jay-Z, Nas, Ghostface Killah, Common, Talib Kweli and a host of others are still alive, Weezy shouldn’t be mentioned within 500 feet of that particular conversation, and b) if anyone remembers how Wayne sounded back in the early days of Cash Money, it’s hard to imagine that he got as good as he is (which is still not mind-blowing), without help from someone else (and several folks have gone on record saying they’ve ghostwritten for Wayne).
All of this to say-why do *you* think Lil’ Wayne is so popular?
