Lot of revisionism and false narratives get thrown around when talking about Wayne back then...but this idea that he was some proto-mumble rapper that popped up out the blue nice as fukk all of a sudden is fake news...
For people who weren’t Wayne fans back then and actually want to know what it was like to witness his progress and evolution back then, instead of just lazily attributing it to a middling generic east coast struggle rapper that Stunna signed around the time....I’d recommend starting with sq4 ...the sqad up tapes dropped before, during and after the release of 500 Degreez...and he was eviscerating shyt left and right on them, it’s then that I started recognize he was gonna be a special emcee...500 Degreez dropped in the midst of that, and stood out as kinda lazy and sloppily put together by the standards of his then current output...to put it in context, 500 Degreez was the aberration compared to the stuff he was doing on mixtapes before and after it and directly leading to Carter 1..I basically expected 500 Degreez to be what C1 ended up being as far as his unleashing on the game...didnt even really trip though because he kept on putting out sqad tapes right after it....
the Prefix was his last mixtape right before Carter 1...it’s mostly him spazzing over Black Album beats, and the style that people who weren’t listening to him for real were shocked to hear on Carter 1 was already fully realized and fine tuned...
C1 dropped a couple months after that and was basically mixtape Weezy rhyming over (a reinvigorated) Mannie Fresh production...lost in a lot of this discussion is that Mannie’s sound evolved during that time as well...on 500 Degreez they were trying to have spit over those more upbeat happy sounding latter day Big Tymer type beats, that didn’t fit what Wayne was trying to do stylistically at the time...they were on the brink of making the same mistake on C1... Shake Something was an early scrapped single that continued that same sound...Wayne and baby beefed a lil bit over the direction of his music and the Sqad ended up beefing with him too, recorded a bulk of what ended up the official version of C1 (along with a ton of shyt that’s leaked as the Carter 1 Sessions) on his own without input from Baby with outside production...they added some newer, darker fresher sounding Mannie beats...and the rest is history
Immediately following C1 he drops the Suffix, the first Dedication after that, C2 after that, dedication 2 after that...then he took over the game...but listen to Prefix->Carter 1->Suffix->Dedication 1->Carter 2->Dedication 2 and you’ll seldom witness a continuity as far seeing a rapper evolve and grow organically as you see there...it’s like having footage of Kobe practicing his game in the summer before exploding on the league the year he dropped 81
Gillie for coming up with such an interesting project.
I crack up when people say "I been a fan of Wayne since Tha Block is Hot". Like Wayne wasnt literally on at least 8 albums before that.