Then things went bonkers, and the young work-a-holic unleashed, by my reckoning, 42 mixtapes in the span of three or four years, depending on how you count the overlap. A few years later, he released Tha Carter II, his last RIAA-approved, in-stores record, upon which the Napoleonic five-foot-four New Orleanian both emulated Jay-Z and usurped him by audaciously calling himself “the best rapper alive.” To zip through a backstory that is gradually calcifying into legend, Lil Wayne was once the lowly Onomatopoeia Contributor in a short-lived boy band called the Hot Boyz - his talents trended towards peculiar noises (“bling bling”, “scrrr!”), and sing-songy codas (“drop it like its hot”, “loud pipes, big rims, woadie that’s my life”). In one signature moment, that kind of dorky wrinkle in time foolery sums up everything that’s baffling, bogus, fascinating, and frustrating about the album that was all but teed up to be the hip-hop record of a generation - a generation that has indeed watched Lil Wayne get better, much better, in time.

It’s a difficult thought to transcribe from Lil Wayne-ese to HTML, but if you ask me, the most mind-boggling lyric on Lil Wayne’s hotly anticipated new record goes like this: “Watch.