Courtesy of LA Weekly
Lil Wayne’s embargoed, and rumored final album Tha Carter V has been “coming soon” for a long time now. Long enough for us (me) to get excited, impatient, enraged, disappointed, crushed, disillusioned, and finally, excited again. There’s greater than a snowball’s chance in Hades that we’ll (I’ll) get to listen to it before Tax Day, but if all of the stuff that’s happened up until now is anything to go on, don’t bet the farm on it.
In any case, now is as good of a time as any to make sense of the jumbled timeline of this almost mythical body of work.
April 2014
Kobe Bryant “leaked” the artwork for Tha Carter V on Twitter because “leaked” sounds cooler than “released.”
It was supposed to be the artwork anyway, but because it featured no picture of Wayne in his youth with his current tattoos photoshopped onto it, there’s no way it could’ve been real.
That’s more like it. At any rate, the release was slated for late May. Hah. Right.
May 2014
Wayne released “Believe Me” featuring Drake to wide acclaim and it shot up the charts. It sounded like Wayne was a guest on his own song, but you get in where you fit in.
Chances are you’d turn on the radio at any point that month (and at any point during the whole summer) and catch the song just going off. You could then flip to the next major radio station, catch it in the middle, before flipping to the third station, on which the song would just be starting.
With all of that chart success, maybe we’d actually get the album on time.
Nope.
June – October 2014
Getty Photo
The summer was a buildup towards a new release date, October 28, which Wayne and Drake reassured us all definitely wasn’t moving– for real this time– at every stop on their Capcom-sponsored joint tour.
They obviously did this with great malice of forethought.
Wayne put out a few more failed singles during this time; “Krazy,” “Grindin’,” and “D’usse.” They were all pretty good to me, but none of them performed as well on the radio as “Believe Me,” which, well into the fall, was still doing really well.
Nonetheless, that October release date also turned out to be another empty and hurtful lie.
October-November 2014
In the late hours of the day the album was supposed to be released, Wayne instead put out a video, explaining why the album was taking an eternity to put out, and gave us a new single, “Gotti,” featuring the LOX.
WARNING: This video contains explicit language.
Now we were to believe that his magnum opus was coming out in two parts, because he had so much material to share, and we were getting Part 1 on December 9. Sure.
December 2014
This is when things really started getting sticky.
Just five days before Tha Carter V: Part 1 was supposed to come out, Wayne let a very unsettling string of tweets fly, claiming that releasing his album had been a Sisyphean task and that he wanted off of the Cash Money label.
This was a bit of a hard pill to swallow, considering that Wayne has been Cash Money since he was barely a teen. He’s been with Birdman since 1995 when he was just one half of the B.G.’z, had cornrows, and wouldn’t even cuss on a track. Birdman had been more than his boss, he’d been his father figure. Was Wayne really taking his ball and going home? Was this really happening?
Wayne’s long time friend and label rep Mack Maine went on WEDR 99 Jamz and told DJ Felicia that it wasn’t. He said everything is “cool” and that the album was going to released “in the first quarter” of 2015 by a “third party.” He also said that the issues with Wayne and Cash Money were a “family matter.”
From nola.com:
“Everybody has their breaking point, maybe he reached his breaking point,” he said on-air. “I support Wayne 1,000 percent. I feel like this matter will get resolved. Period. If I’m still around it’ll be resolved.”
Prayerfully so.
January 2015
In the meantime, Wayne is releasing a Sorry 4 The Wait 2, a second installment of the mixtape he put out back in 2011 when he was taking forever to drop Tha Carter IV.
https://instagram.com/p/xfXKpsyXWA/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=photo
It’ll probably be good, like everything else he does, but I’m sure that most fans, like me, are going to feel that this mixtape is cool, but Wayne knows what we really want.
The clock is ticking, and if Wayne doesn’t release Tha Carter V by the end of the first quarter, I’m going to have no choice but to do the exact same thing that I’ve done up until now: wait. Restlessly.
