The Messy Soul of Lil Wayne’s <em>Tha Carter V</em>
The rapper’s long-awaited album captures a sense of hard-earned triumph—and dread.
The fact that Lil Wayne survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 12 is the kind of biographical tidbit that gets subsumed by stardom: It’s often discussed as just another reason why ™ is ™. But at age 36, Wayne now wants his listeners to really envision what hischildhood suicide attempt—which he said was not an accident—felt like. On the closing song of , he describes finding his mom’s gun, calling his aunt and then hanging up, putting the barrel to his chest, and waking up “with blood
