Lil Wayne has made it a point of acknowleding that he stopped writing his lyrics down after learning Jay-Z rapped right off the top of the dome.
While appearing on the latest episode of The Pivot Podcast, Weezy F Baby once again reflected on the moment he decided to give up writing and opted to rap whatever came to him. According to Wayne, his 2002 35-minute record "10,000 Bars" was the last time he wrote down a rhyme.
"Like Biggie, love Biggie, love Jadakiss — I love all that shit, but Jay. The moment I heard it I stopped," Wayne said. "You could ask my boy. 'I heard that n***a Jay-Z don't write no more.'"
He continued, "We went in the studio, and we did '10,000 Bars,' and that was the last time I rapped anything off of a paper."
On "10,000 Bars," Lil Wayne displayed his lyrical gift and eviscerated classic hip-hop records such as Redman's "Let's Get Dirty," Jay-Z's "I Just Wanna Love You," Ludacris' "Southern Hospitality," and more. It helped establish him as a solo star, as he would go on and etch himself into the annals of rap history.
Lil Wayne's appreciation for Jay-Z has been well documented in the past. During a conversation with Lil Baby for Rolling Stone's Musicians on Musicians series, Weezy revealed Jay-Z's 1999 album Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter changed his life. The album was so important to him that he even had lyrics from Vol. 3 tattooed on his body.
"It was the first album where I actually [bought] the car that the rapper was talking about. That was my album," he said at the time. "Also, Jay talked so crazy. He went bananas on that album. I got lyrics from the album tattooed on me and shit. I have songs that are remakes of spinoffs of songs from that album."
However, not everyone was feeling Lil Wayne's Jay-Z fandom. Last month, Wayne said Birdman dragged him for allegedly trying to emulate Jay-Z on records.
"When you find a favorite artist, you're going to start sounding like them," he told Rolling Stone. "It took Birdman and them to pull my ass aside and be like, 'Bro, I'm tired of every song you doing sounding like damn Jay-Z. You're not Jay-Z.'"
