Today in Hip-Hop — September 27: Lil Wayne Turns 44, the Year He Sold a Million Copies in a Week
September 27 is Lil Wayne’s birthday — Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. turns 44 today, and he’s still the reference point for what “prolific” is supposed to mean in rap. He signed to Cash Money as a preteen, came up through the Hot Boys, and then did something almost nobody managed in the download era: he sold a million records in seven days.
That was Tha Carter III, June 2008 — roughly 1,005,545 copies in its first week, the first album to clear a million in seven days since 50 Cent’s The Massacre back in 2005. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Wayne had spent the two years before it flooding the streets with the Dedication mixtape series with DJ Drama, building the “Best Rapper Alive” case one free tape at a time until the album was less a release than a coronation everyone had already agreed to.
The album’s biggest single, “A Milli,” was Bangladesh flipping a sample of A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix)” into a stripped-down, one-verse-on-loop beat that turned into one of the most freestyled-over records of the decade — golden-age jazz-rap DNA showing up under one of the strangest, most quotable verses of 2008. Tha Carter III swept the following Grammys — Best Rap Album, Best Rap Song for “Lollipop,” Best Rap Solo Performance for “A Milli” — plus an Album of the Year nomination, and it’s the run that turned Young Money from a label imprint into the ecosystem Drake and Nicki Minaj would inherit next.
Also today in hip-hop:
- Trick Daddy turns 52 (born September 27, 1974) — Miami’s Dade County don, the one who made Slip-N-Slide Records and the Trina alliance a national conversation before “Miami sound” was a genre, it was just his corner of Florida.
- Three 6 Mafia’s Most Known Unknown turns 21 (released September 27, 2005) — DJ Paul and Juicy J’s Hypnotize Minds crew hit #1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and #3 on the Billboard 200. Six months later, they’d become the first hip-hop group to win an Academy Award, for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team
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