Has Lil Wayne finally lost it?

As brilliant as I am, every once in a while I will be wrong about something. But I've never been quite as wrong about something as I was about Tha Carter III. I predicted here and probably some of everywhere else that Tha Carter III wasn't gonna sell very well at all. Or at least not any better than the one that came before it. Man, was I wrong!

You have to remember, in the months leading up to the release of Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne put out some mixtapes that supposedly weren't very good at all, even by Lil Wayne standards. Of course, I wouldn't know one way or another. But even Tom Breihan had to give one of them a vote of no confidence. It looked like Lil Wayne might have finally smoked (or sipped) himself silly.

Then there was that EP he put out during tax writeoff season. It came right around Christmas, and as I recall only a few hundred people bought it. Or was it a few hundred thousand? Anyway, it wasn't very many people. And why was this EP being rushed into stores during the holidays, the same time when the actual album was supposed to be released. I figured this may have been a tacit admission by the label that they'd given up on the label.

Maybe they did, and Tha Carter III ended up doing remarkably well anyway. Maybe the TIs misunderestimated the sheer number of people in this country who lurve Lil Wayne, but are too high or too dumb (or both) to download his album for free, like I did.

Anyhoo, the huge success of Tha Carter III caught me off guard. And I'll be the first person to admit that I'm not qualified to predict whether or not a Lil Wayne album is gonna be successful. All I've got to go on is the quality of the music itself and the marketing effort behind it, and obviously neither of those are very good predictors when it comes to Lil Wayne.

However, I do feel somewhat confident in saying that Lil Wayne might have finally lost it. I somehow found myself still awake at 3 a.m. the other day, and I ended up seeing the video for "Prom Queen," which is just awful, on MTV. Then I fell into an alcoholic coma. Then I woke up the next afternoon and saw where someone had excerpted some shit from the new Rolling Stone, with Lil Wayne on the cover.

Lil Wayne was talking about how he somehow managed to get too much pussy, and it killed his desire to rap. The same thing happened to Eddie Murphy back in the '90s and he ended up picking up trannies. Lil Wayne should consider himself lucky.

And I quote:

"I woke up one morning and had three or four women in my bed where I not only didn't know their last names, I didn't know the beginning letter of their first names. All I know is, they're the most beautiful women in the world, and I was in my own place, in whatever city I was in. And I could have thrown a dart at the map, and I'd probably have a place there too. I knew my driver was waiting downstairs for me. When my nose finally cleared from all the weed I had smoked, I smelled food in the kitchen and I knew it was my chef. Then I look on my phone and see a message and know it's from a popular woman everyone knows. And when I went in the studio that night, I couldn't just rap, 'Yeah, n---a ... .' "

Reading it, I couldn't help but be reminded of back when Andre 3000 used to talk about how rapping had gotten boring for him. And you know how that turned out - motherfucking Idlewild. Sure, in between Stankonia and Idlewild there was "Hey Ya," which - I'm not gonna lie - was my shit back in like '03. But I think Andre 3000's career ever since proves that was a fluke. And we've already heard Lil Wayne's take on rock music.

Before the story in Rolling Stone hit the Internets, one of Lil Wayne's people was saying that he isn't really gonna release a rock album. He was just saying that. But here is on the cover of Rolling Stone talking about how he can't rap anymore. This suggests to me that Lil Wayne's people know that an album full of crap like "Prom Queen" could spell death for his career, but there's only so much they can do.

Or who knows. Maybe an album like that would sell like tits in a can. What do you fruits think?