25 of Lil Wayne’s Best Loosies

Lil Wayne has one of the most prolific catalogs not just in hip-hop, but music at large. Ever since he teamed up with B.G. for True Story at the age of 12, Weezy's been pumping out music for Cash Money Records, whether it was as a Hot Boy or a flagship solo artist. Throughout a career over two decades long, his work ethic has always remained consistent, though his relationship with label boss Birdman has seen better times.

That work ethic has yielded 11 studio albums, over 20 mixtapes (official and otherwise), and countless other random songs floating around in the universe. Our focus today is on that last part, the loosies that never made it to any official projects -- and maybe a couple that did.

The term "official project" gets a little flexible with Wayne because he was so embedded in the mixtape circuit and his music was so widely disseminated. It's often hard to distinguish "official" projects from unofficial ones. During his heyday, roughly between 2004 and 2009, you could find never-before-heard material on both types of tapes; to many, the Drought Is Over series birthed more memorable records than Tha Carter III did.

Nowadays, Wayne is embroiled in beef with Baby while he watches artists once under him like Drake and Nicki Minaj soar to levels never before seen. Tha Carter V needs freeing and no one seems to know how to help. We're clueless, and while we spend time listening to the unfairly slept-on singles that were supposed to lead up to the project, we thought it'd be fun to dig deep into the archives and revisit some of our favorite, little-known Lil Wayne loosies.