Wiz Khalifa

Some rappers want to take over the world; Wiz Khalifa just wants to meet girls, get money, and smoke as much weed as his constitution will allow. “I wanna make people feel good with my music,” he told Apple Music’s Nadeska Alexis in 2025. “And I think that’s what people expect from me anyway.” He’s absolutely right. From the beginning, there was something low-key and effortless about him, a joie de vivre that made his music feel like a party. A military kid, Khalifa (born Cameron Thomaz in 1987) spent most of his childhood bouncing around before settling in Pittsburgh. He started releasing mixtapes around 2005, racking up an increasingly high-profile set of features before breaking through with the back-to-back hit of 2010’s Kush & Orange Juice and 2011’s Rolling Papers—both of which later earned high-profile sequels. Khalifa has often seemed indifferent to genre, mixing hip-hop with hints of club music and the anthemic quality of great pop. That flexibility made him as likely to show up on a Maroon 5 track as a Chief Keef one. After reaching a pop peak with his 2015 Charlie Puth collaboration “See You Again”—a huge hit from the Furious 7 soundtrack—he has returned to many of his pet themes on subsequent mixtapes and albums. True to his mission statement of positivity, he makes a point to lift up (and hang with) younger talent like Luh Tyler, who appears on 2025’s Kush + Orange Juice 2. As he told Alexis, “Those are the things that build relationships forever in this industry.”