Lil Wayne has been a Southern star since the late 1990s, and it was he who rapped the chorus to the B. It really shouldn’t have taken this long. Lil Wayne left his fans waiting at an album-release party Monday. And now comes “Like Father, Like Son” (Cash Money/Universal), an affable and mainly excellent collaboration with his longtime mentor Birdman, the New Orleans mogul also known as Baby. He has collaborated with Fat Joe for the song “Make It Rain,” a rising hip-hop hit. He seems to appear (and acquit himself well) on every other remix.
He followed it with a mixtape, “Dedication 2” (), which ranks among the year’s best hip-hop CDs. Even without a big pop hit, “Tha Carter II” sold more than a million copies. One year later, Lil Wayne seems less like an underdog and more like an A-list star. He rhymed, “To the radio stations, I’m tired of being patient/ Stop being rapper-racist/ Region-haters, spectators, dictators.” There was also room for resentment, as when Lil Wayne took aim at parochial hip-hop stations that shunned Southern rappers. (To a mouthy enemy: “You need sutures on your smoochers, boy.”) The former teenage star was feeling grown, and he gave himself a new title: “Best rapper alive.” And Lil Wayne worked overtime, using his croaky voice to deliver sharply written rhymes. It was his first CD without his longtime partner, the producer Mannie Fresh. Last December, when the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne released his fifth album, “Tha Carter II,” he sounded like a rapper with something to prove.
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