Why We Picked Tha Carter III

Andrew Winistorfer: How did we end up deciding this month should be Lil Wayne?

Cameron Schaefer, Vinyl Me, Please Head Of Music & Brand: We were doing some digging on really good hip-hop albums that are in need of a reissue, and realized there was a plethora of albums in the Cash Money catalog that either hadn’t had a vinyl reissue or hadn’t been pressed at all. It started as a deep-dive into the Cash Money catalog, and as we were digging through, realized that the best stuff in their catalog hadn’t gotten reissues, or came out in truncated versions. With the exception of a European pressing, Tha Carter III has never come out in its full form on vinyl. The original U.S. version was condensed and didn’t have the whole album. This felt like a great opportunity to not only reissue this Lil Wayne album, but also to do a bigger deep dive into the label as a whole.

And obviously it’s a huge record. It’s the last rap album to sell a million copies in its first week, entirely without streams. It really sold one million CDs in its first week. Everyone was so psyched for it to drop. It’s a total classic.

I think if anyone questions why we’re doing this album, they’re sort of missing the point with what we’re trying to do with this subscription. We want to reissue important, classic rap albums, and no matter how you slice it, that fits this bill.

If you’re a student of the genre in any form, this is a required class, so to speak.

And if you love rap, you definitely need to listen to Lil Wayne at some point, and reckon with him. So how better than sending you his biggest commercial album, doing a reissue of Tha Carter III — which Wayne heads still claim is his best — his best Hot Boys album and then an album by his producer.

And then we’re doing another Cash Money album in January, too. Welcome to Cash Money months.

Remastering And Package Details

As far as remastering goes, we had this remastered, right?

Yep, we sent this to Sterling Sound and had Joe LaPorta remaster it. He in particular is one of our favorite remastering engineers, period, but when it comes to hip-hop, the guy is one of the best working right now. He’s done a lot of records, like “Ric Flair Drip” and 21 Savage albums and a lot more. It was a short notice thing where he cleared his schedule to work on this because he loves the album so much.

Yeah, this pressing sounds super clean. I have my copy at home, and I love that you can really crank the volume on this. Had my whole house quaking to “Let The Beat Build” as soon as I got this.

Yeah, and the package is really nice too. Heavyweight, wide single pocket jacket, with some foil elements on the cover. We also put the album on a nice red and black galaxy multi-color vinyl. It looks and sounds amazing.