LOS ANGELES, California – Rapper Lil Wayne is one of the most successful and influential musical artists of this century, yet he can’t remember most of the music he’s made, he revealed during a recent interview.
Lil Wayne, 40, born as Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., discussed his nearly three-decade career in an interview with Rolling Stone published June 10. The five-time Grammy award winner said he can’t decipher between much of his past album releases.
“I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know Tha Carter III, Tha Carter II, The Carter One from Tha Carter IV. And that’s just my God’s honest truth,” Wayne told Rolling Stone. “You could lie, you could ask me (about) such and such song, I wouldn’t even know what we talking about. So it holds no significance to me at all.”
When asked specifically about “Tha Carter III,” for which he won the 2009 Grammy award for Best Rap Album, Wayne said he wasn’t even sure when the album was released.
“I don’t even know if that’s when Tha Carter III came out. That’s how much I don’t know,” he said.
Wayne attributes his memory loss to epilepsy, which he has spoken publicly about in the past, including a hospital stay for seizures in 2013. Memory loss is a health issue commonly associated and reported with epilepsy, according to the Epilepsy Foundation.
“I always look at it as the curse part of the gift and the curse,” Wayne told Rolling Stone. “I believe that (God) blessed me with this amazing mind, but would not give (me) an amazing memory to remember this amazing (expletive).”
Wayne, despite his epilepsy and memory loss, said he has no plans to retire anytime soon. He said he currently works on numerous songs and about 20 verses each day. He also recently completed “ColleGrove 2,” a sequel to his 2016 collaboration album with 2 Chainz, Rolling Stone reports.
“When you’re an artist – a real artist like myself, I was born this way,” Wayne said. “So I don’t think that the real, true artists and pioneers, they never retire. They died doing this.”