Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. was born on September 27, 1982, and spent his first few years in the impoverished Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. In a CBS interview with Katie Couric, Carter described why he goes by the name of "Wayne" instead of his given name, Dwayne. "I dropped the D because I'm a junior and my father is living and he's not in my life and he's never been in my life. So I don't want to be Dwayne, I'd rather be Wayne".

Lil Wayne started carrying his first gun, a tiny .32 Derringer, when he was just 11-years old. During an interview, he would later reveal, "You can't go nowhere not strapped. That's life."

Wayne has a tattoo dedicated to his deceased stepfather, Reginald "Rabbit" McDonald, who he has said he considers his real father.

"She feed him lies with his silverware
She don't want love, she just want her share"

His career began in 1996, at the age of 13, after he recorded freestyle raps on Birdman's answering machine, leading the rapper and owner of Cash Money Records to mentor him. Lil Wayne soon joined Cash Money Records as the youngest member of the label.

Yup. Before he was known as Lil Wayne, Weezy, or Tunechi, he called himself Shrimp Daddy, with inspiration for the pseudonym coming from former Cash Money artist Pimp Daddy.

The Hot Boys formed in the summer of 1997 with original members Lil Wayne, B.G., Juvenile, Turk & Birdman's nephew Bulletproof AKA Lil Derrick. Lil Derrick left the group shortly after recording the first album and was killed in 2002.

In the outro of "Let It All Work Out", Wayne opens up about the self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was just 12 years old: "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 die, but as I was dying / God came to my side and we talked about it / He sold me another life and he made a prophet."

Although he was an honors student at McMain Magnet School, Wayne dropped out at the age of 14. He would later reveal that it was his mother who told him quit: "She saw me getting ready for school one day ... putting my gun in my backpack. And she said, 'You gotta bring that to school with you?' And I remember asking, 'You don't want me to bring it?' And she thought about it, she said, 'I do.' It wasn't two minutes later, she walked back to my room, she said, 'You don't go to school no more. You gettin' a GED,' and I was like, 'Okay.'"

Beyoncé says that because "Soldier" had a "Southern feel" and beat, the group wanted to collaborate with Lil Wayne and T.I. who according to her added "rawness, realness and edge to the song".