The Lil Wayne of several years ago - the “Dedication” mixtapes and the 2008 commercial smash “Tha Carter III” - would never have let his gun talk for him. “See me walking with a limp, that’s my gun walk,” he raps in “Gunwalk,” “I don’t do no arguing, I let the gun talk.”

Often, this reclaimed swagger takes the form of grim warnings, Lil Wayne threatening foes with physical violence (“Trigger Finger”) and women with what sounds like the least pleasurable sex of all time (“Bitches Love Me”). However, Bryan “Birdman” Williams, one of Lil Wayne’s closest associates, brushed off the drug chatter, telling a New York radio DJ that the rapper’s medical woes had been caused by “how hard he works.” Speculation about his health - and what exactly triggered the seizures - raged across social media while he was hospitalized, with rumors that he was near death circulating alongside reports that he’d overdosed on the street concoction known as sizzurp: prescription cough syrup mixed with fruit soda. Yet this month, Lil Wayne revealed just how human he is when a series of seizures put him in L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for days. “She fell in love with the Martian,” he says of an admirer in “Wowzerz,” one of many Lil Wayne songs in which he refers to himself as an alien. On “I Am Not a Human Being II,” the famously out-there rapper boasts, as he has countless times over the last decade, that he’s different from the rest of us - weirder, funnier, richer, sexier. The title of Lil Wayne’s new album rings familiar, and not just because it’s the sequel to a 2010 disc.

I am not human 2 lil wayne