No Ceilings
No Ceilings Album ∙ Hip-Hop/Rap ∙ 2009 Lil Wayne In the scope of an impossibly prolific career, Lil Wayne’s mixtape output is something else entirely. To diehards, the franchises he’s birthed—the Sqad Up tapes, the Da Drought s, the Dedication s—are worthy of the same reverence as Wayne’s proper albums, and the initial No Ceilings is no different. First released in October 2009, the tape was a holdover from between the MC's late-2000s pop-rap opus Tha Carter III and the rockstar-lifestyle posturing of 2010’s Rebirth . What Wayne did on No Ceilings was remind fans how much in love he is with rapping, annihilating beats from already popular songs in a long-established mixtape tradition. Wayne was so adept at this—his couplets both catchy and bizarre—that it was not uncommon to hear DJs sneak No Ceilings revamps of Fast Life Yungstaz's “Swag Surfin’” (“Surf Swag”), 3 Deep’s “Watch My Shoes” (“Shoes”), and Gucci Mane’s “Waste...