First, a few facts: Born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., the 28-year-old rapper now known as Lil Wayne-or sometimes Weezy-grew up a straight-A student in a neighborhood called
Hollygrove in New Orleans's 17th Ward, which was among the hardest hit areas of the city during the flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Young Dwayne, soon to be Wayne, began his career as a near-novelty act, parlaying his love of late-'80s and early-'90s hip-hop and rap-tinged R&B into a career as a kiddie gangsta rapper, signing with the cult-legendary local hip-hop label Cash Money Records as one half of a duo known as The B.G.'z (the other half was a kid named B.G.) when he was 12-the same age he accidentally shot himself in the chest with a handgun, reportedly missing his heart by just a centimeter. But even that didn't slow him down. He soon joined another Cash Money act, The Hot Boys-which featured Juvenile, a local rapper who was already making a name for himself as a solo artist-and enjoyed his first taste of pop stardom when the quartet's 1999 album, Guerrilla Warfare, debuted at number five on the Billboard charts.
Having flooded the market with an almost nonstop flow of releases-some official, some on mixtapes, some as a guest rapper on other people's tracks (he now commands a reported $150,000 an appearance)-Wayne finally established himself as a solo megaforce in 2004 with the release of the Tha Carter, which unveiled to the world the Wayne we all know today: a spastically flowed force of hip-hop nature whose subject matter ranges from the blingtastic to the bizarrely psychedelic, and whose asymmetrical rhymes, delivered in a raspy, Auto-Tuned croak, have since appeared on dozens of hit singles and earned him four Grammy Awards and millions of dollars. Wayne's 2008 album, Tha Carter III, sold more than a million copies in its first week, and while he hasn't replicated that level of success since, he hasn't stopped trying. His own label, Young Money Entertainment, prodigiously counts new heavies such as Drake and Nicki Minaj among its recent discoveries, and, this spring, the label will release Wayne's highly anticipated ninth album, Tha Carter IV.
Though Wayne stands just five-foot-six in sneakers, he is a towering force in pop music right now-and, like Sinatra, he likes to do things his way. While he has often called himself "the best rapper alive," a claim many might dispute on purely technical grounds, Wayne is without a doubt one of the most prolific, weirdest, and hardest-working rappers in the game right now. A father of four, he managed to have two children in 2009 by two different women (singer Nivea Hamilton and actress Lauren London) within a 12-week period. He says he has given up the Styrofoam cup of cough syrup he could be seen constantly sipping from in the 2009 documentary Tha Carter. In any event, it would seem he had no choice but to give up such pastimes cold turkey, at least temporarily, when last year he served an eight-month prison term at Rikers Island in New York for attempted criminal possession of a weapon. (If anyone ever doubted his relentless creative restlessness, just before heading to jail he released Rebirth, a rock album.)
By outward appearances, Lil Wayne might not seem to embody the life of a typical religious person, but he is, in many ways, a walking miracle. He has the word fear tattooed on one eyelid and god on the other, but if you blink, you might miss that, since he doesn't seem to close his eyes often, much less sleep. Keeping it real? That's so last year. Wayne's doing something better by keeping the world of pop music unpredictable with his intergalactic alien oddness, and, if nothing else, he has made it a far more interesting and strange place.
Appropriately, when it came time to interview Wayne, we turned to another iconoclast of sorts, Paris Hilton-who, like Wayne, loves music and clubs and has done hard time (in 2007, for violating her probation in connection with an earlier no-contest plea on a reckless driving charge)-to do the honors. Hilton took a break from filming her new reality show, The World According to Paris, in Los Angeles to connect over the phone with Wayne, who was at home in Miami, with a little help from Interview contributing music editor Dimitri Ehrlich.
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Drake on first meeting Lil Wayne:
The first meeting wasn't really anything pivotal. It was cool. I think he saw that I was a good kid, or trying to be a good kid, and I was just staring at one of my idols. I stayed on the road with him for a while, about a week and a half. And I think it was the last night before I went back home, we finally got into the studio and made some music.
Nicki Minaj on life without Wayne's mentorship:
I don't ever want to imagine that. I can't even imagine my career, um, my creative spirit without Wayne. I credit him with a lot of what I do. Prior to him, no one relevant in hip-hop really gave me that support. I feel like I'm still intertwined with him creatively. Before I met Wayne, the person that was spearheading my career was the one person who always told me, "Don't be too playful, don't be too kooky and weird... no one's gonna feel that, nobody wants to hear that." So I stifled a lot of that early on, and then once that we parted ways, I was like, "Guess what, I'm gonna just be me."
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