In the four or so years since Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter V” was first intended for release, hip-hop — which was for a time gleefully remaking itself in Lil Wayne’s image — found new tributaries, new role models. For some, Drake is the paterfamilias, with his pan-regional pastiche pop-rap. For others, it’s Future and Young Thug — themselves children of Lil Wayne — and their distended wails. And for others still, it’s J. Cole, a modern moralist reinvigorating the modes of two decades ago.

Lil Wayne, now 36 years old, has come to feel like an elder, his innovations so baked into the genre as to be nigh invisible. A star since he was a teenager, he has been releasing music for two decades. When he began speaking about “Tha Carter V” several years ago, he described it as his final solo album. But then contractual battles with his label turned it into something more — a rallying cry for artist independence, verging on the apocryphal.

All the while, the genre was changing. When Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart a decade ago, it was a victory for his unorthodox path through the mixtape circuit, and still something of an outlier in terms of hip-hop’s success in the mainstream.

But now those things are utterly normal, a circumstance embodied by no rapper more so than Logic, who has become one of hip-hop’s most commercially successful artists by charting a path similar to Lil Wayne’s while making music that’s loyal to different traditions.