Cordae knows exactly what he wants to say. He chooses his words and phrases carefully. He speaks from a place of truth. That’s why the three-time Grammy Award-nominated platinum-selling Maryland-raised rapper has quietly become one of the modern generation’s most trusted narrators. A remarkable life has given him a lot to say. He went from the trenches and public housing with his mom to stratospheric success. After a series of buzzing singles, he reached critical mass with his 2019 full-length debut, The Lost Boy. It bowed in the Top 15 of the Billboard Top 200 and included four gold-certified singles-“RNP” [feat. Anderson Paak], “Have Mercy,” “Broke As Fuck,” and “Kung Fu.” Beyond unanimous praise from Billboard, Complex, High Snobiety, New York Times, Pitchfork, and Stereogum, he garnered a pair of Grammy Award nominations in the categories of “Best Rap Album” for The Lost Boy and “Best Rap Song” for “Bad Idea”. He’s the rare artist whose presence can be felt on-screen in a Super Bowl commercial alongside legendary Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese and among XXL’s coveted “Freshman Class.” Along the way, he linked up with Roddy Ricch for “Gifted” as well as joining forces with Eminem for “Killer.” Absorbing wisdom from a life-changing trip to Africa, enduring the loss of a friend gone too soon, and evolving as an artist and a man, he tells this story in widescreen technicolor on his 2022 second full-length offering, From A Bird’s Eye Views.
Lil Wayne began his career as a near novelty, a preteen delivering hardcore Southern hip-hop. Through years of maturation and prolific output, during which the delivery of his humorous and wordplay-heavy rhymes gradually changed from ringing and pugnacious to stoned and rasped, he developed into a million-unit-selling artist with a massive body of work, one so inventive and cunning that it makes his claim of being the “best rapper alive” worth considering. Wayne debuted at the age of 12, received his first platinum certification five years later as a member of the Hot Boys, and immediately thereafter became a formidable solo artist with Tha Block Is Hot (1999), his first of 12 Top Ten albums on the Billboard 200. During a period of constant output, entailing not just successful full-lengths but also reputation-building mixtapes and featured appearances on pop hits like Destiny’s Child’s “Soldier” (2004), he reached mainstream superstar status with Tha Carter Ill (2008). A triple-platinum blockbuster, it spawned the number one pop hit “Lollipop” and the number six follow-up “A Milli,” and netted three Grammy awards, including Best Rap Album. Throughout the 2010s, despite numerous legal and creative battles, Wayne continued to be a regular presence on the upper reaches of the charts with albums such as Tha Carter IV (2011) and I Am Not a Human Being II (2013), additional smash singles as a headliner, and a continually lengthening list of collaborative hits, including the multi-platinum “Sucker for Pain” (for the Suicide Squad soundtrack in 2016) and “I’m the One” (headlined by DJ Khaled in 2017). Since the latter hit, Wayne has topped the Billboard 200 with the consecutive LPs Tha Carter V (2018) and Funeral (2020) and has continued to issue non-album singles and mixtapes, like his 2021 Rich the Kid collaboration Trust Fund Babies, 2023’s Tha Fix Before Tha VI, and the DMX-assisted 2023 single “Kant Nobody.”