This story was originally published in February 2010. Since
then, Lil Wayne's sentencing has been postponed two times. For the
latest on his developing case,
click here.
"I don't like to stop," says Lil Wayne.
"I believe you stop when you die." The biggest rapper in the world
stands 23 floors above Atlanta and five feet six in black Chuck
Taylors, his wifebeater tee baring a torso as ink-covered as the
pages of a doodler's notebook. It's 8:30 p.m., two days after
Christmas, and he will be up for the next 11 hours —
monitoring four football games, smoking blunts, six or seven of
them, sending 40-odd texts (including condolences to his mom for
today's loss by the New Orleans Saints), making calls and
auditioning 600-odd bars of potential beats over six hours in a
recording studio.
Dwayne Carter, 27, has been on this schedule for close to a
decade. But on February 9th, one week after he drops his
rock-oriented seventh official studio album, Rebirth, he
begins a 12-month sentence for gun possession, stemming from a 2007
charge. He's known plenty of people from his old neighborhood who
have gone to jail, but he hasn't asked them for any advice on how
to prepare. "This is not something you get no advice on," he says.
"This is Lil Wayne going to jail. Nobody I can talk to can tell me
what that's like. I just say I'm looking forward to it."
Look back at Lil Wayne's rise in photos.
Tonight, the rapper wears his long dreads tied back, along with
bookish, black-framed glasses and Polo pajama pants. A small
diamond cross hangs on a thin chain around his neck. "It's the only
jewelry I wear every day," Wayne says in a deep rasp, then flashes
a sleepy, diamond-encrusted smile. On a glass table before him are
his iPhone, T-Mobile Sidekick, a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, a
bag of Sour Patch candies, a bottle of iced tea and a roll of about
three grand worth of hundreds — "just in case I need to send
someone to the store."
An enormous amount of man-hours goes into keeping Wayne happy
and creative — to keep his torrential rhyme flow, which earns
around $150,000 per guest appearance, coming. He's never far from a
recording studio or a portable recording setup (even if it's just a
professional mike and a laptop with GarageBand). Wayne's personal
chef, Noel, stands at parade rest in a double-breasted black
uniform and apron, ready to prepare steak or chicken in minutes.
Somewhere within text-message summons awaits Wayne's personal
driver, Mr. G., who wears a slate-gray chauffeur uniform, complete
with cap. "It ain't no party," says E.I., Wayne's road manager, who
lives with a T-Mobile dedicated to one caller. "You don't get no
sleep. There ain't no such thing as 'off.'" E.I.'s main daily goal,
he says, is to be awake before Lil Wayne. "Even if it's just 10
minutes."