Image via Julia Beverly/Getty ImagesShow your love of the game by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon so that we can keep churning out interviews with legendary producers, feature the best emerging rap talent in the game, and gift you the only worthwhile playlists left in this streaming hellscape.Pete Hunt is still trying to figure out a justification for posting a link to Celly Cel & UGK’s “Pop the Trunk” on LinkedIn.There’s no shortage of retrospective pieces about Lil Wayne’s artistic apex (roughly Carter I to No Ceilings, spanning 2004 to 2009) and the incredible volume of music that accompanied it. We know Weezy. We know he is one-of-one, that in the four-year career swell that defined Wayne, he reinvented the mixtape as a medium of expression. POW’s Abe Beame even wrote 4,500+ word exegesis on how Wayne forever changed the mixtape.The internet is flush with pieces tackling Wayne’s music, but not the discourse surrounding his music. Remember: Lil Wayne’s creative peak coincided with the Golden Age of the Internet, a time when being online felt fun, especially if you were into music, culture, and Gawker comment sections. Lina Abascal’s excellent book on bloghouse, Never Be Alone Again, describes how the lawless uploads and downloads of this era led to music discovery shifting irrevocably online—precisely where the best parts of Lil Wayne’s discography resided.From the beginning, Lil Wayne was closely linked to the music blogosphere’s nexus of writers, promoters, producers, and what we now call “content creators.” Posts from these tastemakers were all part of a listener journey that gently nudged users towards Nah Right’s Drought 3 download page. There was also plenty of coverage outside of blog rolls. Prestige print publications deployed their best talent to document the mixtape phenomenon with profiles, listicles, and parachute journalism from the frontlines of internet culture.The reason so many music writers were enraptured with Wayne was that his