How Lil Wayne’s absent father inspired his rap name
As a kid, Dwayne Michael Carter Jr started out rapping under the stage name Baby D. The rationale was clear: a young boy, Baby, using the initial of his first name, D Simple. But, before long, young Carter decided that he wanted to perform under another moniker: Lil Wayne was born.
Wayne’s parents got divorced when he was just a toddler, and his dad, Dwayne Sr, left for good—he abandoned his family, and his son grew up not knowing him. In fact, he came to view his eventual stepfather, Reginal McDonald, his mother’s third husband, to be his dad in all but blood. McDonald was the man who helped to raise Wayne, and, when he was shot in 1996, while Wayne was only 14, both Wayne and his mother were devastated. One of Wayne’s many tattoos is a tribute to McDonald. “I’m human,” he told GQ in 2009, reflecting on his stepdad’s death. “Affected me like it would affect anybody else I would imagine.”
All of this is to say that Wanye has no love for his biological father. And that sentiment is at the heart of his famous stage name, as he explained to CBS anchor Katie Couric in 2009, around the time he started blowing up as a result of the massive success of Tha Carter III and its lead single ‘Lollipop’. Dwayne was minded to get rid of that first letter of his birth name, because it was the name of his father.
“I’ll tell you why I dropped the D right here on TV,” Wayne said. “I dropped the D because I am a junior. My father, he’s livin’, and he is not in my life, and he’s never been in my life. So I don’t wanna be Dwayne. I’d rather be Wayne.” Couric then asked Wayne if his biological father knew that this was the case. Did he know that his son couldn’t stand to share the same name with him? In response, Wayne laughed, “He knows it now.”
Wayne has, in some interviews, been reluctant to elaborate too much on his biological father, but, in 2011, he spoke about him for a feature in GQ. “He don’t give a shit about me,” he said. “And I don’t give a shit about him.” But while that may be true, he also mentioned that, when he was doing a gig in his native New Orleans, Wayne once spotted his father hanging around outside the hotel he was staying in. This, he believed, couldn’t have been a coincidence. “If Lil Wayne got a show in New Orleans,” he said, “the whole of New Orleans knows. Basically, you’re not there for nothing else but me.”
Wayne sent over one of his entourage to see what was going on, and Dwayne Sr tried to play it cool. “He tells my man,” Wayne recounted, “‘Oh. I didn’t know y’all was here. I’m here waiting for this little ho to get off. Get off work from the hotel.’ For real? That’s when I was like, ‘Typical Dwayne Carter.’ So that’s what’s up with me and my real father.” He wants absolutely nothing to do with him.