Rise to Fame
Cash Money signed him at 11, which wasn't unusual for New Orleans in the '90s. What was unusual was that the kid actually delivered. He was on tour with the Hot Boys at 15 and had a platinum solo debut at 17. But the real breakthrough wasn't any album. It was the 2006-2008 mixtape blitz, when he rapped over every beat in circulation and gave it all away free. This wasn't a marketing play. Da Drought 3 alone had enough density that calling it a mixtape felt like underselling it. When Tha Carter III finally dropped in 2008, it moved over a million copies in its first week. The free music didn't cannibalize sales. It created demand nobody knew how to manufacture.
In the Spotlight
The Super Bowl LIX halftime show was in New Orleans, his city, and they gave it to Kendrick Lamar. He admitted the snub "broke" him, a rare moment of public vulnerability from someone who'd spent decades projecting invincibility. Tha Carter VI arrived in 2025 and debuted at number two with 108,000 units, the lowest opening of his career and a steep drop from Tha Carter V's 480,000. But he sold out Madison Square Garden on opening night of the 20th-anniversary tour and added a second leg when the dates ran out. His position is the one every legacy rapper dreads and few handle gracefully: universally respected, commercially declining, too proud to coast on nostalgia but unable to recapture the era he defined.
Side Notes
He stopped writing down his rhymes in 2003, recording a 35-minute freestyle called "SQ7" as a goodbye to his notebook, tearing out each page after he used it. He's composed everything since in his head, or so he says, which is either a flex or an explanation for the inconsistency, depending on who you ask. He spent eight months at Rikers in 2010 and later published the diary he kept there, Gone 'Til November, in which the most revealing detail is how much UNO he played. He picked up skateboarding around 30 and eventually earned a pro model board. The guy doesn't have hobbies. He has obsessions.