Dedication 2 Turns 20

It wasn't an album. It wasn't supposed to be an album. In concept and execution, there was nothing album-ish about it. Instead, Lil Wayne and DJ Drama's Dedication 2, which turns 20 this Friday, was part of a completely different tradition. It was a mixtape, an artifact that was supposed to be bootlegged and disseminated through street channels. DJ Drama built his name on the mixtape, and that tradition is the reason that people still love to hear him bellow his echo-drenched catchphrases today. Lil Wayne wasn't new to the mixtape, either. He'd used the form to develop his voice and his approach. Between 2002 and 2005, Wayne released something like 14 of them, and they trace his evolution from kiddie bounce-rapper to effortless beat-annihilating weirdo savant. But Dedication 2 was the right mixtape at the right moment. It wasn't an album, but it was better than an album, and some of us couldn't help but treat it as one.

Wayne and Drama released the first Dedication mixtape in 2005, shortly before Wayne's album Tha Carter II made his artistic ascent undeniable. People can argue about this all that want, but from where I'm sitting, Dedication and Tha Carter II were the beginning of The Run — the stretch of a few years when Lil Wayne operated in a strange and undiscovered flow state, keeping the entire world hanging on his ridiculous linguistic mutations, otherworldly pockets, and outlandish slick-talk. Plenty of rappers had great extended moments before Wayne, but The Run was more chaotic and abundant than any that had ever come before. Wayne worked faster, giving very little thought to pacing or career strategy. He rapped over everything, all the time. Nobody could keep up.

Even if you were paying attention to both Lil Wayne and to the mixtape world, as I was, Dedication 2 was a baffling thing to consider. People had done great things with mixtapes before, but those great things took different forms. About six months before Dedication 2, for instance, Wayne's rivals Clipse dropped We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2, an everlasting classic of the form. Clipse and their Re-Up Gang allies Ab-Liva and Sandman treated that tape like an album. They locked in, living in Pharrell's guest house together, and they methodically went crazy over an ace selection of beats both current and classic. But Wayne didn't do anything methodically, so Dedication 2 worked in different ways.

There is very little order to Dedication 2. Tracks cut off mid-verse. They rewind, disappear, and then come back later in the tape. Drama yells over everything. Wayne pauses the festivities to clarify things. He thinks he's the best rapper alive because every rapper should think he's the best rapper alive. Also, he only watches sports on TV. Sports sports sports. That's all he watches. He and Skip Bayless weren't best friends yet, but maybe that was always written in the stars. Some of the tracks on Dedication 2 are one-off freestyles. Others were maybe supposed to come out as singles at some point, or as verses on official posse-cut remixes of other people's songs. It doesn't matter. It's all Dedication 2 now.

The first track on Dedication 2 isn't music at all. It's just Wayne introducing himself and happily rambling for a few seconds. The second track on Dedication 2 is "Get Em," Wayne's hijacking of "Get From Round Me," a deep cut from the Diplomats' independently released 2004 double album Diplomatic Immunity 2. Wayne was friends with the Dipset guys. He showed up on their records all the time. He claimed he was so Dipset, Dip-South, baby. He and Juelz Santana kept promising I Can't Feel My Face, the collaborative tape that never came out. Juelz is on Dedication 2, vowing to fish filet you and then tell your moms to get the paper. But those connections didn't stop Wayne from taking "Get From Round Me" and making it his. Instantly, "Get From Round Me" became the forgotten footnote, and that beat became the Dedication 2 intro beat, always and forever. "Get Em" keeps rewinding, Wayne repeating himself before Drama stops the interruption and just lets Wayne go. And then he goes.

At the beginning of "Get Em," the first voice that we hear doesn't belong to Wayne or Drama. It's a deep and sonorous white guy's voice, and it belongs to Doug Copsey, narrator of the straight-to-video 2000 documentary Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. What Copsey says is this: "You are watching a master at work." That kind of line practically begs to become a DJ drop, and that's exactly how Drama uses it. A DJ drop is supposed to be pure hyperbole. It doesn't have to be true. In this case, though, it is.

On Dedication 2, we get Lil Wayne, the master. He's Luke Skywalker, walking into Jabba's palace and introducing himself as a Jedi Knight. We'd seen the progression — this kid from nowhere discovering his gift and gaining confidence in his abilities, becoming what he was always supposed to be. After that, we saw the final form. There's no polish on Dedication 2. It's Wayne in free-association zone, writing or rewriting songs in real time. He'll seize on a pattern, a cadence, or even just a vowel sound, and he'll let it inform whatever he's about to say. "“N***as know I don’t spit, I vomit, got it?/ One egg short of the omelette.” "I'm back on defense, back in the zone/ I eat rappers and go in my yard and bury they bones." "Fuck me? Fuck you/ What it is? What it do?/ I was ready in '81, and I was born in '82." (Wayne was just 23 when Dedication 2 came out, but he'd already been rapping professionally for half of his life.)

It's fun to quote Lil Wayne lyrics from The Run, but they don't always properly convey what he was doing. Wayne's presence was bigger than his words. He seemed to exist in a zone of permanent creation, letting his brain wander wherever it needed when a beat played in his headphones. He didn't sing — not then, anyway — but there was a melodic bounce in his delivery. He stumbled instinctively from one flow to the next, and his pauses and hesitations meant more than other rappers' nastiest punchlines. He made it sound so easy, as if rapping was less effortful than talking, or eating, or breathing.

Other people show up on Dedication 2. The aforementioned Juelz Santana. An on-fire Freeway. Willie The Kid, a Drama protege at the time and a veteran abstract underground type today. Remy Ma, tough and reliable as always. Pharrell, spitting what might be the best rap verse of his entire career on Shawnna's "Gettin' Some" remix. Curren$y and Mack Maine, the first artists signed to Wayne's newly formed Young Money subsidiary. (Nicki Minaj and Drake, the two megastars who came out of the Young Money camp, would both arrive soon, but neither was quite there yet.) The other rappers on Dedication 2 are all perfectly solid, but they're mostly useful as points of comparison. They can't do what Wayne does. They are earthbound, and Wayne is so high he could eat a star.

Some of the beats that Wayne annihilates on Dedication 2, like Little Brother's "Lovin' It" or the Diplomats' "Get From Round Me," are forgotten obscurities. Others are the big hits of the moment: T.I.'s "What You Know," Big Boi's "Kryptonite." Dem Franchize Boyz' "I Think They Like Me." Some are even canonical classics from the previous decade, like OutKast's "Player's Ball" or 2Pac's "Ambitionz Az A Ridah." It doesn't matter. For Wayne, those beats are all raw material. They're canvas. At one point, he raps over a beat made from the sound of basketball thunks and sneaker squeaks. That's canvas, too.

The things that made Dedication 2 a mixtape, as opposed to an album — the freely stolen beats, the rewinds, the drop-outs, the constant DJ Drama interjections — might serve as pure irritants to anyone who didn't experience it in 2006, who's just now listening for the first time. If that's you, I hate to tell you that you had to be there, but you had to be there. Part of the excitement was in hearing Wayne pluck these sounds that were floating in the air at that moment and twisting them into thrilling new shapes in real time. There was nothing else like it then, and there's nothing else like it now.

The one moment on Dedication 2 where a structure really does emerge comes right at the end, on "Georgia Bush." Wayne was almost done making Tha Carter II when Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown, and that's why it only got a few throwaway references on the album. With "Georgia Bush," Wayne had time to seethe. He flipped Field Mob's regional-pride track "Georgia" (which itself flipped Ray Charles' version of "Georgia On My Mind," which itself flipped Hoagy Carmichael's original song) into a fiery, purposeful condemnation of the president who allowed the carnage to happen. Lil Wayne will never be a protest artist. Years later, he endorsed Donald Trump, almost certainly in exchange for a presidential pardon of one of the federal charges that he faced at the time. But on "Georgia Bush," Wayne brought levels of rage and focus that he'd never touch again.

I think "Georgia Bush" is the main reason that rock critics ultimately took Wayne seriously. It definitely made it a lot easier for me to explain why he mattered. Dedication 2 got rave reviews in publications that had never previously considered Wayne's artistry. People started printing up CD copies of Dedication 2 with barcodes and selling them in record stores, as if it were an album. Later on, Drama claimed that Dedication 2 got too big — that it was the main reason that federal agents raided his office and hit him with RICO bootlegging and racketeering charges less than a year later. The mixtape format changed. It became an online phenomenon. Wayne changed, too. Dedication 2 might've been semi-illicit cult material at the time, but it went a long way toward building the goodwill that would push Wayne to mainstream mega-stardom soon afterwards.

When The Run was happening, I was an evangelist. I kept telling people, again and again, that we would be talking about Wayne's moment for decades in the future, that we were watching forms break and legends take shape in front of us. I'm wrong all the time, but I was right about that. Greatness doesn't always take the form that it's supposed to take. The best albums aren't always albums. It's always important to recognize when you're watching a master at work.