Lil Wayne Tells The Full Story Of His Childhood Suicide Attempt On Tha Carter V

Lil Wayne is back and more sincere than ever on his long-awaited new album, Tha Carter V, which dropped on Friday (September 28), the day soon following the rapper's 36th birthday.


Immediately after listening to 22 tracks spanning over 80 minutes, fans arrive at the album's outro, "Let It All Work Out," which finds Wayne beginning up about the time he sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound as soon as he was just 12 years old. In the past, he's claimed that the shooting was merely an accident, although his verse on Solange's 2016 track "Mad" sparkled speculation that it was actually a suicide attempt. On that song, he rapped, "And As soon as I attempted suicide, I didn't perish / I remember how angry I was on that day / Man, you gotta let it go before it get up in the way."


Wayne confirms the speculation toward the end of "Let It All Work Out" — which samples Sampha's "Indecision" — by detailing what happened while in the shooting: "I aimed where my heart was pounding / I shot it, and I woke up with blood all around me / It's mine, I didn't perish, however as I was dying / God came to my side and we discussed about it / He sold me another life and he made a prophet."





Wayne's mother, Jacida Carter, also addressed her son's suicide attempt on Tha Carter V's penultimate track, "Used 2." In a spoken outro, she mentioned, "I still don't know today. Was he playing with the gun or was it an accident? I be wanting to ask him however I never asked him right considering that these years. … I never really noticed out about what really happened with him and that shooting."


According to a recent Billboard cover story, Wayne shot himself in the chest at age 12 immediately after his mother forbade him from rapping. In the same interview, Young Cash president Mack Maine explained Wayne's choice to finally tell the entire story of what happened that day. "He just notified me one day that he was prepared to address it right now Maine mentioned. "Just being an adult, reaching a level of maturity and comfort where it’s like, 'I desire to talk about this because I know a lot of people out here might be going through that.'"