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Lil Wayne Takes On Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar And 21 Savage Beats For 'Dedication 6'

Lil Wayne is ready to re-up his long-running mixtape series with a sixth installment dropping on Dec. 25.
Nicholas Hunt
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Getty Images for BACARDI
Lil Wayne is ready to re-up his long-running mixtape series with a sixth installment dropping on Dec. 25.

Advisory: The belowsongs contain explicit lyrics and profanity.


Lil Wayne's Dedication 6 is due to drop on Christmas Day, but Weezy Santa can't seem to keep his new music a secret. In addition to releasing two songs from the mixtape, he's previewed a third in the making — and from the sounds of it,the sixth installment of his long-running mixtape serieswill feature Wayne putting his own spin on some of hip-hop's biggest beats of 2017.

"Blackin Out," featuring Euro, finds Lil Wayne going in on Jay-Z's "Story Of O.J." Originally produced by No I.D., the track samples Nina Simone's classic "Four Women." His verse isn't quite as thematic as Jay-Z's racial diatribe, of course, but the New Orleans native known for his sick freestyles does his own version of blacking out on the mic.

"Bank Account" features Wayne taking on Atlanta rapper 21 Savage's biggest hit from this year's Issa AlbumLP. It's the only song on 21 Savage's major-label debut that the rapper himself produced.

But the best remix from Wayne may be yet to come. A YouTube video snippet shows Wayne in the studio with an engineer as an instrumental of Kendrick Lamar's "DNA." is cued up. The song, produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, is one of the most explosive beats of 2017. Mike WiLL actually built the back half of the beat around an a cappella version of Lamar rapping frenetically, he told NPR Music in April.

"He was going so hard; that man was rapping so crazy," Mike WiLL said, "and I had to build a beat around that. I didn't want the beat to just sound like a regular boom-clap, boom-clap. I wanted that s*** to sound just as crazy. I wanted it to sound like he's battling the beat."

Guess we'll have to wait till Christmas morning to unwrap the rest of Lil Wayne's gift rap.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Rodney Carmichael is NPR Music's hip-hop staff writer. An Atlanta-bred cultural critic, he helped document the city's rise as rap's reigning capital for a decade while serving on staff as music editor, culture writer and senior writer for the defunct alt-weekly Creative Loafing.