2008: #2 - "Mr. Carter"

There were bigger hits ("Lollipop", "Get Money", "Mrs. Officer"), and a couple of songs that, on first listen, were instantly jaw-dropping ("A Milli", and the crown jewel of Lil Wayne's career thus far, "Let the Beat Build", which was not released as a single, and sadly did not qualify for this list).

But perhaps the defining and most memorable moment of Weezy's breakthrough album Tha Carter III (yes, "Tha" is in the actual title) was the extraordinarily quotable "Mr. Carter", featuring dueling verses by Wayne and another of hip hop's finest Mr. Carters - Jay-Z.

The production is fairly typical 00's stuff, almost like a leftover from the first Blueprint album, so the vocals are what make this track work. And it's not really the words they're saying that are so profound (the most noteworthy ones are grabbed from an old Jay-Z song and repeated by Wayne on the outro), but how they're saying them. The vocals actually become part of the track and lift it above its basic blueprint. That's how flawlessly the rhyming is executed, at least as far as we're concerned.

You almost have to listen for yourself to understand, because it looks pretty dumb on paper, but here's the best excerpt from Wayne's 2nd verse:

"Cause Wayne win and they lose
I call them April Babies cause they fools
And while they snooze

We up
Feet up like a paraplegia
Or paraplegic

Or parallel park
In that red and yellow thang old skool Atlanta Hawk
Like I'm from Colli Park

But I'm from Hollygrove
Now all my Bloods scream 'Su-Woo' and 'Da, Da Doe'
I know my role

And I play it well
And I weigh it well

On my Libra scale
I suck a pussy fuck a pussy leave it there
Long hair don't even care"

Trust us, it sounds sicker than it looks. And from Jay-Z's guest verse:

"Show no mercy in Murcielago's
I'm far from being the bastard that Marcy had fathered
Now my name's being mentioned with the martyrs
The Biggie's and the Pac's and the Marley's and the Marcuses

Garvey, got me a Molotov Cocktail flow
Even if you box well
Can't stop the blows
Kaboom, the Roc Boy in the room
The dope boy just came off the spoon
Also

I'm so fly 

I'm on auto
Pilot, while guys

Just stare at my wardrobe
I see Euros

That's right, plural
I took so much change from this rap game, it's your go"

Wow. Maybe none of it makes any sense to you, but it was music to our ears.