“Welcome back hip-hop I saved your life,” raps Lil Wayne on his polarizing album Tha Carter III. Hip-hop is a genre that has been deemed in need of saving ever since its integration into the mainstream. Plenty of artists have declared the genre dead, plenty have uttered words of resuscitation and plenty are its self-proclaimed saviors. The quote cited at the top is from one of these such artists, Lil Wayne. Here is an artist who has been in the game since he was roughly nine or ten years old and since become one of the most recognizable – for better or worse, names in the music industry.

The source of recognition is, of course, his music. But the interpretation of his recognition is far from universally agreed upon. No matter where you are in the world, whether online or in public, there are equally as many people holding Wayne’s pedestal to the heavens and proclaiming him king, as there are refuting his legitimacy even as a musical artist and classifying him as trash. Though not everything he has created is worth writing home about, it very likely isn’t trash. The defining moment in Wayne’s career came in 2008 with the release of his sixth studio album, Tha Carter 3.

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