Lil Wayne Tells All, Blender Interview

Lil Wayne tells his life story to Blender in a recent interview:

The Hustle: “It’s a faucet I can’t turn off, I can try and ignore it, but I can’t ever turn it off. And I gotta keep going, ’cause I still don’t have the crown. Someone else just won Best Male Hip-Hop Artist at the BET Awards. Why not me? Huh? That tells me I’m not going hard enough. That tells me I’ve done something wrong.”

Real Life: Spotting Gremlins, Rush Hour 3, and E.T. DVD's on his coffee table, I ask him what other ways he wastes time. “I don’t waste time,” he responds. He watches TV, but has no patience for anything besides the ESPN lineup. ” I don’t watch anything where they go ‘action’ and ‘cut’ cause that means its not real. If I wanna see some acting, I can get 15 naked bitches to act out a scene. I’m a real life nigga. Life’s too short for me to die tomorrow and the only thing I know about is the last episode of Law and Order.”

Mama Said: “I wasn’t ever no action-figure kid, if I wanted to fight, I’d fight for real.” Wayne thanks his mother, Cita Carter, for this mentality. A tough-as-nails chef, she raised him by herself, teaching him early on how to act like a man. When he was in junior high, she gave him his first Glock, with instructions to empty it into the first guy that messed with him.
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As the West Dixie Highwaycurves toward North Miami, the city’s glitzy epicenter becomes a distant memory. The cruise ships, sandy nightclubs and gated island communities of South Beach give way to all-night coin-op laundromats, strip clubs lit in queasy green neon (NUDE REVUE! FRICTION RUBBING!) and run-down single-story homes. Al Capone, John Collins, Gianni Versace—swells like that never set a loafer on this soil. At 149th Street, though, an unexpected outpost of wealth looms into view. The windows are tinted and the doors are always locked—to get in, you either know a code or someone famous. The parking lot gleams with Benzes, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, a luxury fleet under 24-hour guard. This is Miami’s Hit Factory—the recording studio where Justin Timberlake made his last album, where Shakira and Scott Storch regularly bump into each other in the halls and where Lil Wayne is camped out, hard at work, one hot June night.

A clock on the wall reads 4:08 A.M. one moment, 5:22 the next, 5:26 what seems like an hour later—time has slipped its leash. Since Wayne arrived in his chauffeured black Phantom around midnight, he hasn’t stopped moving, hasn’t taken a seat, hasn’t so much as leaned on anything. The New Orleans rapper, 26, zigzags from vocal booth to control room to lounge; he jerks and bops and kicks in time with blaring instrumentals, feeling out rhythms, mouthing rhymes to himself. He’s wearing a fitted white Polo tee, slouchy Evisu jeans and wildly patterned Supra high-tops. A red bandanna plumes from his left pocket like a cartoon wound. He carries a triple-stack of Styrofoam cups, swigging the sweet, narcotic cocktail of promethazine-codeine cough syrup he’s never without—recently, he’s been mixing it with Jones cream soda. Between sips, Wayne sucks at a spindly brown blunt, forcing marijuana smoke from his nostrils in stuttering double columns. His smile is an infestation of diamonds, but right now he isn’t smiling much. There’s an agitation to his drags—a fretful element more chain-smoker than Cheech Marin. Within this fume-spewing, rhyme-spitting perpetual-motion machine, you detect the rumbles of anxiety.

And then, Wayne stops moving. He raises a palm to his jaw. “Fuuuck.” His toothache is back. It’s been bugging him for a few days, and the pain is irritatingly familiar. “Anyone seen my Orajel?” he growls. Someone rises from a couch, flips open a phone and disappears.

Wayne’s discomfort is contagious. The members of his entourage shift their weight and sneak glances at their boss for cues. The rule around Wayne, especially when he’s grumpy, is speak when spoken to, otherwise keep your mouth shut.

Suddenly, he breaks into a tuneless croon.

I got a toothache
The size o’ Virginia
I got a tooothaaache
And it hurts like a muh-fucka!

Gutter and Kid-Kid, two teen MCs from New Orleans signed to Wayne’s Young Money imprint, shake their heads in sleepy commiseration; they’ve been here all night, occasionally recording eight-bar verses and fishing for Wayne’s approval: “You fuck with that one, Weezy?” Josh, one of Wayne’s engineers, nudges a cursor around a computer screen, chuckling. Nadia, a curvy olive-skinned girl, grins. Curled up on a leather couch, she’s overdressed for a sleepover: gold sandals on her feet, black tights decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis on her legs, an oversize gold Chanel bag doubling as a pillow. Wayne likes having girls in the studio—they rub his back when requested; they smile demurely when he makes jokes; they play with their cell phones and stare into the middle distance, keeping him company of a quiet, undemanding sort.

No Orajel in sight, Wayne throws open a Louis Vuitton weekend bag and yanks out a translucent-orange prescription bottle and a plump pack of gummy bears. He takes a little from column A, a little from column B, gulps down the mess and resumes crooning, his eyes squeezed shut.

I’m gon’ eat a Xanny
I’m gon’ eat some candy
And the candy prolly won’t help
But if it makes you feel good, it’s good for your health!

It’s a demented rock-star jingle, which is perfectly appropriate. Lil Wayne is the most demented rock star in the world. Two weeks ago, his sixth album, Tha Carter III—full of raps about space, cannibalism, wealth and drugs—sold just over a million copies in its first week: a stunning seven-figure bow when music-industry experts had proclaimed the seven-figure bow a relic of better, bygone days. A week ago, Wayne appeared on seven separate songs in the Billboard Hot 100—“Lollipop,” his androidish ode to oral sex, spent five weeks at No. 1. Barack Obama has taken to shouting him out in stump speeches.

But Wayne has other things on the brain tonight. He has a court date in two days in Atlanta: drug-possession charges he thought had been dismissed until his manager informed him otherwise. He has offers coming in faster than he can process them: 8 Mile–style biopic deals, clothing-line deals, a deal for Wayne-branded bubbly called Halo. And two days after court, he’s leaving for a two-week vacation, the first he’s had in months. “He was gonna go to Saint-Tropez,” his longtime friend and manager Cortez Bryant explains, “but when he found out it was in France, that was off.” Wayne despises long flights. He can’t sit still for that many hours, hates ­having to fasten his seat belt when told to, and his blunt-a-minute weed habit doesn’t really jibe with TSA guidelines. “Wayne likes to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it,” says C.J., one of his assistants.

So Saint-Tropez has given way to a resort in the Dominican Republic—a much shorter flight—but even the prospect of white-sand beach-bumming seems to stress Wayne out. At one point, passing in the hall, I say, “So, you’re headed to the Caribbean, huh?”

He keeps his eyes down, mutters, “Something like that,” and brushes past on his way back to the booth.

Despite his million-selling triumph, there’s a voice nagging at Wayne, flaring up in his head like a toothache, crashing the party. It’s the reason he spent the morning he learned about Tha Carter III’s sales recording a song about Tha Carter III’s sales, for release to radio stations that day—“A million sold, first day I went gold/How do I celebrate? Work on Tha Carter IV,” he rapped. It’s the reason he’s here now, in the bleary-eyed dawn, recording take after take of songs with no clear idea of where they’ll end up. Many MCs tout their tireless hustle ethics, but with Lil Wayne, it seems less like a brag and more like a pathology. “It’s a faucet I can’t turn off,” he says. “I can try and ignore it, but I can’t ever turn it off.“

And I gotta keep going, ’cause I still don’t have the crown,” he explains. “Someone else just won Best Male Hip-Hop Artist at the BET Awards. Why not me? Huh? That tells me I’m not going hard enough. That tells me I’ve done something wrong.”

Wayne’s South Beach condo is on the 26th floor of a 35-story tower. Its western exposure is glass from floor to ceiling, offering IMAX views of the speedboats and shipping cranes below. The walls are beige; the furniture, cream leather. A pool table dominates the living room, where a row of black-and-white photographs hang: Martin Luther King, Al Pacino in Scarface, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix (“Cortez set this place up,” Wayne admits. “I ain’t really listened to all of those musicians yet”). Inspired by the art-collecting habits of his friends Jay-Z and Kanye West, Wayne’s thinking about adding a Basquiat to the room (last year, one canvas sold for $10.5 million): “The first time I saw one, I said, ‘It costs that much for this?’ But I want my house to look cool.” On another wall there’s a flat-screen TV flanked by two $2,000 Taylor electric guitars—Wayne’s a competent player, and you can hear him solo on Tha Carter III. “I love when a girl walks in here and says, ‘Oh! Those guitars are such nice decorations!’” he says. It’s the day after his studio all-nighter, and he’s padding around shirtless, wearing plaid pajama pants and matching slippers. “Pfff! I’ll pull one down and start playing. ‘This ain’t no decoration, bitch—I’m nice!’”

Wayne has places in Atlanta and New Orleans, too (“I got an 11,000-square-foot mansion for $1.9 million ’cause of the hurricane”), and even though he uses this one the most, it’s clearly the home of a guy whose true resting place is the tour bus: Vuitton luggage splays everywhere, spilling tees, jeans and Jockey boxers still in the shrink-wrap. Wayne’s sneakers, tossed haphazardly, fill an entire room: The floor is a gnarled topography of Dunks, Air Force Ones, Jordans, Stan Smiths, Bapes, Vans and Pumas. A narrow path weaves through the patent-leather foothills.

There is no evidence that a meal has ever been prepared in Wayne’s kitchen. His stainless-steel refrigerator is stocked like a convenience store’s: rows of Fiji water, rows of A&W root beer and, in the door, a row of Moët bottles. There is no food in sight besides candy. The counter is crowded with Blow Pops, Sour Patch Kids, Snickers, Milky Ways, Dots, Skittles. “It’s always like Halloween in here,” says one of Wayne’s assistants, who goes by T.

Today, T is joined by another handler, E.I., and a hulking Dominican tattoo artist named Juan, who’s waiting to re-ink some of the designs that cover Wayne’s arms, face and torso. As Juan puts it, “I’m gonna throw a whole lot of red on him.” A month ago, Juan wrote three words in red above Wayne’s right eye: I AM MUSIC. (The color signals Wayne’s affiliation with the Bloods.) Today, Wayne places his fists knuckle-to-knuckle, so that a faded message forms, running in cursive along the bottoms of his hands: I AM SELF MADE BITCH! “I need this freshened up,” he says.

Before Juan can start freshening, though, Wayne has to finish what he’s doing. And what he’s doing, of course, is working on a new track. He has a little white iBook connected to a mic in his living room, so he can watch traffic on the 836 while he works. Between takes, he picks from a plastic bowl of tennis-ball-size doughnut holes, toothache be damned.

The song—which may end up on Luv Sawngz, Wayne’s planned R&B LP; on his forthcoming duets album with T-Pain; on a mix tape; or buried forever on an external hard drive—is full of cosmic come-ons that Wayne sings rather than raps: “Shorty, don’t say shit, get in my spaceship/Let me take you to another world/A better world/Probably in the sky, flying with the fishes/Or maybe in the ocean, swimming with the pigeons.” It’s a daffy rhyme, not far in spirit from the ones he was making up last night about Xanax and gummy bears. This is part of Wayne’s genius: He rides free-associative waves, pushes tangents to surrealist extremes, and the results are exhilaratingly odd: gangsta dada. This might have to do with all the codeine cough syrup he drinks. “It’s a narcotic high. It’s like he’s taking a little bit of heroin,” says Dr. Cynthia Kuhn, professor of pharmacology at Duke University Medical Center and coauthor of the drug taxonomy Buzzed. “You can get an other­worldly feeling, and you can feel less constrained by your usual thought patterns.

”But as unhinged as Wayne’s rhymes get, he can strike an intense, no-nonsense figure in person. Spotting Gremlins, Rush Hour 3 and E.T. DVDs on his coffee table, I ask him what other ways he wastes time. “I don’t waste time,” he responds. He watches TV, but has no patience for anything besides the ESPN lineup. “I don’t watch anything where they go ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Wayne says. “’Cause that means it’s not real. If I wanna see some acting, I can get 15 naked bitches to act out a scene. I’m a real-life nigga. Life’s too short for me to die tomorrow and the only thing I know about is the last episode of Law and Order.”

Wayne has felt this sort of urgency since childhood. He grew up in Hollygrove, a working-class New Orleans neighborhood, and while other kids were playing with toys, he was writing raps and performing them on neighborhood porches. “I wasn’t ever no action-figure kid,” he says. “If I wanted to fight, I’d fight for real.” Wayne thanks his mother, Cita Carter, for this mentality. A tough-as-nails chef, she raised him by herself, teaching him early on how to act like a man. When he was in junior high, she gave him his first Glock, with instructions to empty it into the first guy that messed with him.

At 18, Wayne decided he wanted a teardrop tattoo, the first of four he wears today. These usually signify people you’ve killed, and although Wayne won’t explicitly explain their meaning, he habitually points to his tears when he’s threatening to destroy enemies. “I asked my mother permission to get it, and she respected my choice,” he recalls. “When I came home and showed it to her, she told me, ‘Boy, I might have to get one of those for myself!’”

Atlanta, December 2007. Wayne is camped out, as always, at a recording studio. Tha Carter III was supposed to be in stores this month, but that was before most of the album leaked, denting Universal’s fourth-quarter bottom line. Rather than proceed with compromised material, Wayne decided to scrap it and start over. “There wasn’t a second thought,” he says. “I was like, I got 135 trillion more songs, I’ll just make an album from that.” Even without any more leaks, though, the album will keep sliding down the release schedule, a month at a time, until June. It will be safeguarded against piracy by several means: Engineers from the earlier sessions will be replaced; Bryant will keep the album’s master hard drives on him at all times; when the music arrives at the plant to be pressed onto CDs, boxes will be labeled with the names of less download-plagued artists, like Neil Diamond. Despite this, the album will be all over blogs a week before release.

But that is in the future. Right now, in Atlanta, Wayne is excited about a new song. “I gotta play this for you,” he says, and asks his engineer, Deezle, to cue up a track called “Lollipop.” The song foregoes the hardened, brain-scrambling rhymes Wayne has perfected in lieu of simple, insinuating pick-up lines delivered in an oozing, digitally modulated warble. Wayne grins and shouts over the music, “Dudes are gonna hate this one!” He pauses for effect. “Ugly dudes, that is!”

Flash forward seven months and “Lollipop” is the single that turned Wayne from the biggest story in hip-hop—debated and extolled on stoops, porches, lunch lines and message boards—to the biggest story in pop. With one Auto-Tuned flourish, ladies were invited to the party—and with them, Top 40 radio—and Wayne found himself with the biggest hit of his career. “We’d come in from the weekend and it would be, like, 8,000 spins!” recalls Katina Bynum, a Universal product manager who’s worked with Wayne since Cash Money signed him at 12. “We were like, Were they playing anything else besides it?” She couldn’t remember the last time it felt that great to work at a record label. “We were running up and down the halls, champagne was popping, like, Wow.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine Tha Carter III selling quite so astronomically if it weren’t for all of Wayne’s gray-market output, too. Since 2005’s Tha Carter II, Wayne appeared on dozens of mix tapes and dozens of other artists’ songs—it was a great way to keep up with the breakneck pace of music fandom circa 2008; it proved that he had a wealth of material, not just singles, worth hearing; and it was wildly lucrative. “You call Wayne and ask him for a feature, he says yes, no matter what,” Cortez Bryant says. “Then it’s up to me to work out the money. Wayne gets $75,000 for each guest appearance, but that’s what we call the love fee. The regular fee these days is $125,000.” (If half of Wayne’s 60-plus cameos in 2007 clocked the love fee, that means he made $2.3 million off guest appearances alone.)

Industry execs are busy trying to analyze the Wayne model and figure out ways to duplicate its success. “I’m not sure how you do it. There’s not a lot you can take away from this,” says Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown. “Wayne is sitting on the same shelf with U2, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye—creative geniuses. He’s almost like a poet laureate. You can’t do a case study on that.” Not that the label hasn’t tried to impose its own strategic sense on Wayne. Before Tha Carter III came out, Universal was unhappy with the volume of Wayne material flooding onto the mix-tape circuit and airwaves. They feared overexposure, worried that an audience accustomed to so much free material would be less likely to pony up for a CD. “The label was blunt. They told us, ‘Wayne shouldn’t be doing all this. He’s gonna burn himself out,’” Bryant recalls. “Wayne said, ‘Nah. I’m gonna keep it up.’ He raps like he breathes.”

Like any rock star, Lil Wayne isn’t immune to self-mythologizing. To hear him tell it, he’s a superman: He describes surviving two bullets—one a self-inflicted accident at age 12 and one fired into his bus by an angry groupie—with chuckling élan; he’s an indefatigable hustler: “I’m always in the lab”; and he’s an artist beholden to no one but his own codeine-addled muse: “The word pressure is not in my vocabulary.”

But the man desperately needs a vacation. The first day we meet, he’s running 10 hours behind—handlers try to rouse him from bed throughout the day, but word keeps coming back that “he’s in a coma.” The next day, at his condo, he snaps at T for failing to pack enough cough syrup for the trip to Atlanta. “I thought you said you were doing it,” T protests.

“Me? Why would I say that?” Wayne snarls. “Since when is that my job?”

I’m sitting across from Wayne with a notepad, Juan is sitting across from him with a tattoo needle, and our conversation has taken a prickly turn. Wayne once mentioned that he keeps a set of encyclopedias on his bus, so I ask about his reading habits. Does he ever pick a subject at random and learn all about it?

“No,” he says. “I’m a millionaire.”

“What’s that mean? Millionaires still have things they can learn!”

“Are you a millionaire?” he asks. “No. So don’t tell me what millionaires do.”

And then Wayne’s up, moving again, agitated. “That hurts my bone,” he says to Juan, who’s been inking his elbow. He goes into his kitchen, comes back chugging a can of root beer. He sets it on his coffee table, half-full, and stares out the window, running a finger around his bellybutton. “Take care of that,” he mumbles, and T carries the can to the trash.

Wayne walks over to his iBook and adjusts the microphone. “There’s just one more thing I’ve got to do,” he says. And then he starts working on another song.