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It’s been two decades, nearly exactly, since Lil Wayne first appeared. The year was 1997; the album was Get It How U Live!!, the debut from the Hot Boys. On the cover, he’s expressionless in a white tee and camo, his hair not yet in the flowing dreads that would become his trademark. And he’s foreshadowed, sort of tucked to the side. Understandably so: he was a kid, the formidable crew’s pubescent sidekick. On Get It’s “Block Burner,” his solo showcase, there are no hints of the virtuosity to come — there is no indication that one day, this same kid will provide us with as thrilling a manipulation of the conventions of the English language as we’ll ever see. But there is a spirit, a joy.
Of all our icons, has any lived as many lives? Curio, best rapper alive, mixtape genius, blockbuster. Now in 2017, at just 34-years-old, he’s an elder statesman. And he’s in limbo. His next album, the long-promised Tha Carter V, is frozen in a bitter contract dispute with Bryan “Birdman” Williams — the man Wayne, at least at one point, considered his father.
Some of us, perhaps rightly, feel his best work is behind him. Some of us hear last year’s guest spots for Chance and Solange — the rare recent times where, as he himself admits, he was really trying — and can see more greatness yet to come. And as long as we’re waiting to find out, why not look back?
This week, The FADER turns our attention to Lil Wayne. With an oral history of “Bling Bling,” we dive into his early cultural impact. With an investigation of his relationship with Drake, we examine his extensive work as a mentor. And in interviews with Mannie Fresh and Q93’s Wild Wayne, we chart the exact, singular trajectory of his career. And there’s more: essays, reminiscences, rants. Taken all together, it adds up to a kind of early, scattershot biography. This is The FADER’s Lil Wayne Week.
Broken up into 7 Parts will post each!
Part 1- Wayne's Tattoo Artist
Lil Wayne’s former tattoo artist, Dow Hokoana, has built her life around the motto, “Follow the adventure.” In doing so, the 51-year-old mother of two secured the job of her dreams: professional tattooer to the stars. Though Hokoana, a Bay Area native, started off as an animal control officer in Oregon, she later moved to Miami in 2007 in pursuit of a career as a tattoo artist. Shortly after that, just two years later, she received an unexpected surprise: Lil Wayne’s personal assistant strolled into her shop and offered her a gig as Weezy’s on-call ink artist.
Over the phone from her tattoo shop in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, Hokoana talked to The FADER about her favorite Wayne tats, the process of tattooing his entire lower body (yes, every inch), and life after Weezy.
How did Lil Wayne find you?
A tattoo artist who I had never met named Duel had done a couple tattoos on Wayne and had heard that he was looking to find an artist who could basically sign on, kind of as a full-time deal, to tattoo him until he had a complete body suit. He preferred a female because he was doing a complete body suit. Duel, who had seen my work around South Beach, recommended me.
Wayne ended up sending his PA into my shop one day and asked if I’d come out to the Hit Factory where Wayne was recording because he wanted to meet me and talk about some tattoos. At first I looked at this guy like, “Yeah right,” at which point he looked at me and went, “Look, Wayne asked for you by name, he’d really like you to come out but if you don’t I am going find someone who will.” That broke it down nicely enough for me, so I called my boys that I worked with and I gave the license plate number of Wayne’s escalade and I said, “If you don’t see me in the morning, call this number in” [laughs]. And that was the beginning of a seven-year relationship. I’ve done approximately 300 tattoos on him.
Walk me through an average tattoo session with Lil Wayne.
It really varied. Typically he wants to be tattooed in the night time, so my average time with him was meeting with him around midnight and staying until about 7 a.m. Of course on tour, it’s: do the show, he does his thing, then around 1 a.m. I go to his hotel room.
He’s the most gracious respectful man I’ve ever worked for. He’s been great to me, and I’m like the odd duck in this crew for sure. I’m an older white woman, old enough to be his mom, who’s definitely not an avid rap listener. But that’s never had any bearing on how he’s treated me. He just wanted someone he could trust, someone who could do the job to his standards, and he’s got a work ethic like a mule for sure.
What’s something unexpected that you learned about Wayne while working with him?
Just to find out what an awesome guy he really is. He really does care very deeply about the things he believes impact his life. It was always really a very interesting scene. The clowning that goes on on the bus. Wayne renting out whole bowling alleys so we could have a day off. That was one of his favorite things to do on tour. After so many days, everyone gets a total off day and very often he’d make it a family bowling day.
He can also be really silly. Once on the bus, one of the guys fell asleep and he poured Tabasco sauce in his mouth. He was like, “Nobody sleeps if I’m awake!” And this was a big guy. Wayne thought he would wake up when he poured it in his mouth but he didn’t even wake up and like an hour later he woke up wiping his mouth yelling, “What is wrong with my mouuuuth?” The list goes on. How you see him is really how he is. He never made me play mindreader.
What’s the most iconic piece that you did for him, and how did it come about?
He has a cloud and a lightening bolt on his cheek, up by his temple. One day he’s like, “I want that” and points to my daughter’s book bag and there was this lightening bolt on it. I was like, “You really want that? I’m a custom artist. I can do some cool stuff.” Sometimes he just doesn’t want it to get that deep. Sometimes it’s “just a tattoo.” But sometimes it did mean stuff. The one I liked best is on his hip. It’s one that people hardly see, but it wraps the whole side of his hip. It’s of 10 individual Vegas-style showgirls, some are just the head and headdress, some are full bodied. It’s really cool looking.
One time he hit me up at like 3:30 in the morning for a tattoo of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can. I’m like, “Oh okay, you just want me to duplicate this famous piece of art in tattoo form at 3:30 in the morning? Sure boss” [laughs].
You originally said Wayne brought you on to complete the lower part of his body piece — is it finished? Like, every part of his body?
Yes, his body suit is complete. In one other article, I wondered if we would ever do all of his body parts and I had made a guess that it would happen in three years. And sure enough, three-and-a-half years later we did every part of his body.
How did Wayne handle the more, um, sensitive areas?
Even being a female all you can do is basically hold your own breath while tattooing [that area] because it’s just... [makes a painful crying sound]. I’ve done this for a few clients. I’m sure [Wayne] was in pain, but he took it like a G. For real. It was yeeesh. But it happened. It took about 45 minutes. He’s a G.
What exactly is the tattoo on his…
I think that’s something that he would probably would want to speak on himself, if at all, so I’m going to keep that private. However I will tell you that it’s from tip to tail, it’s an image that goes straight across the board. I can tell you that across [Wayne’s] bum is a colorful checker-board. The reasoning behind that is that he wanted to try color but thought it wouldn’t show up or stick to his skin tone and I wanted to prove a point, that using the correct colors and toning even across a darker surface will absolutely show up. So both butt cheeks are black square, colored square, black square, colored square, etc.
What’s the process of tattooing a male client’s genitals like? Does it have to be… does he have to take Viagra… or…
Oh boy, this is where it gets awkward [laughs]. Contrary to popular belief, it cannot be hard at all. Basically, my gloved hand is palm up and the head is going to sit right on the palm of my hand and I’m going to put my thumb over it and push it down so that it’s flattened and wide across my hand. One time I had a guy get a little nervous and it was getting a little edgy and *— it doesn’t work inflated *— I’m going to hit that and it’s going to deflate so quickly because of the nerves and sensitivity. You could never do it, no matter how badass you are.
How has working with Lil Wayne changed your life?
Wow. Dramatically. He has always supported me. I was basically just another female tattoo artist in South Beach. I did very good solid work, but the level of art that I’ve seen come out of that city floored me. It really was amazing to feel like he chose me.
It still surprises me, like he’s been in L.A. and said, “Hey, can you get on a flight in about 2 hours,” and I told him, “I could call anybody for you — Kat Von D, anybody will come to your hotel room for what you do for me. And he’s like, “Well I don’t want them.” To feel that level of support and to be able to go on and, no joke, no matter where I go there are people who come and get tattoos from me and say they wanted me before they even really went through my portfolio because I tattooed Lil Wayne. That’s wow. I could never do that on my own.
Moving forward, what does your future look like with Wayne?
He’s called me twice since he’s moved to L.A. and I’ve stayed [in Miami]. Nicki, Drake, Twist and those guys moved to L.A. too, so with him being done [with tattoos] most of my work was, “Hey can you come hit up this guy,” like his friends. I’ve done Cee Lo Green, I’ve done a bunch of people through him. I live a very simple, low carbon footprint kind of lifestyle. Needless to say, as much as I love Wayne, he’s kind of the other side of that. I think Fort Myers beach is the perfect spot for me. But I’ll always have love for him. He’s the best.
This Is The Woman Responsible For 300 Of Lil Wayne?s Tattoos | The FADER
Part 2- Lil Wayne's New York Period
Lil Wayne does not like New York. We know this because he has said so in the most undeniable terms possible. It was 2012 — a particularly bad year for Wayne and New York City. Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg claimed that Nicki Minaj was not real hip-hop (the most classic of Old Head New York Rap Arguments), so she canceled her Summer Jam performance in retaliation. Wayne’s response? “Flat out, I don’t like New York.” It came up because of the beef (which, thanks to the internet, had escalated into a way bigger deal than it needed to be), but it was also because, earlier that year, after performing “Uh Ohhh!” with Ja Rule at the Beacon Theater, both rappers got arrested on separate gun charges that would ultimately land Wayne in jail, giving him the chance to sober up and write a prison diary/ pseudo-meditation on what it means to be locked up and famous.
Hearing Wayne denounce a city he’s not even from and never really lived in shouldn’t have been too big a deal, but this is New York, and New York prides itself on being annoying, brilliant, and difficult. How could Wayne, an annoying, brilliant, and difficult rapper hate the place? The outrage was implied in the coverage:
Lil Wayne! “Flat Out I don’t Like New York”
Lil Wayne’s Feelings Toward NY!
Birdman Seconds Lil Wayne’s ‘I Hate New York Notion’
Feud Alert! Lil Wayne Bashes New York, Senator Demands Apology
Was it because he’d already spent a significant amount of time here, recording track after track with Harlem’s forgotten hope Juelz Santana, only to have the project disappear into a mess of red tape and mismanaged expectations? Or was it because he got arrested here?
Wayne and Juelz could have been a perfect match, and I Can’t Feel My Face was meant to cement them as an iconic rap duo that had the kind of chemistry you could never hope to manufacture. Wayne’s verses folded in on themselves, piling neuroses on top of ego, while Juelz was a battering ram with a perpetual grin. He could threaten to shoot you and make it sound fun.
The album never actually came out, and was leaked, barely making a splash before the next project with Wayne’s name attached to it came through the pipeline. It’s not the greatest thing either rapper did, but it does have one particularly high moment: a distillation of everything that made the Wayne of 2006 so great. On “Get at These Niggaz” he raps: “What if they armed and what if they ready to shoot?/ We strap up, shut the fuck up, and dippity do/ What we gotta/ Who we gotta/ When we gotta/ It’s murder murder murder murder more murder, don’t think about it.” Wayne’s verse manages to inject pathos into braggadocio and death. When he raps that “don’t think about it” at the end, it’s as if he’s interrupting himself. Murder is not glamorous, and maybe bragging about it serves an entirely different purpose.
We’ve watched him grow up in the spotlight, but we won’t ever truly know him. He is constantly outrunning himself, his music travels too many unruly paths to trace properly.
Only Wayne could write such relatable nihilistic exhaustion because the violence of this world is just too much, over a beat that sounds like it was stitched together with a watery guitar sample taken from a 128 kbps mp3 downloaded on Napster in the late ’90s. His threats sound like the harsh reality of grudging acceptance.
A year or so after the non-release of I Can’t Feel My Face, Lil Wayne popped up on Ja Rule’s “Uh Ohhh!,” a track that sounded like a Timbaland cast-off which was ushered into the world to salvage the public’s waning interest in Ja Rule. It is, nonetheless, a very good track: Ja Rule melds his growl to the stuttered beat, which sounds like a robot on the verge of breaking down, his voice is the show and the spine all at once, but then Wayne comes in:
“Weezy F is in your building, I will step on your building/ From the steps, of my building, raise hell. Hell’s risen/ Call me young Raekwon, I’m a chef in Hell’s Kitchen/ And flow, sweet as devil’s food, I eat angels for dinner/ Call me what ya want, I don’t give a finger in the middle/ I’mma hold it down and blow up, the anchor is the missile/ When I say we got them brrrrrr! I ain’t trying to whistle/ Longbody Maybach, it make me feel so little/ I’m ballin on the suckers and I won’t pick up my dribble/ Retarded on the beat, I spit hospitals.”
The video is low-budget, just Ja Rule and Wayne exchanging joyful verses and weird leg kicks on top of what looks like one of those double decker tour buses as it circles New York aimlessly. There’s a timecode at the bottom, as if it’s a rough cut. Maybe it is.
Wayne is a dense, often subtly personal writer. He says what he feels in interviews, even when it makes him look bad. He is, on some level, emotionally available, just maybe not in the way his fans would like him to be. We’ve watched him grow up in the spotlight, but we won’t ever truly know him. He is constantly outrunning himself, his music travels too many unruly paths to trace properly. In those days when he was roaming around New York, hanging out with Juelz Santana, recording with Ja Rule, or maybe hopping down to Miami to drink Sparks with DJ Khaled and a gaggle of dolphins, it felt like we could pin him down — or at least place him somewhere on the Eastern seaboard — for a few minutes.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from Wayne’s complete aural ubiquity. All that history buried under piles of digital detritus left to decay behind forgotten MediaFire links and disorganized DatPiff archives. Wayne’s New York songs exist almost entirely in this space, a hazy period that gets harder to retrace every day. They are the sound of what happens when you become unmoored from the place you’re from, and how that can destroy you just before it builds you back up again. This was not quite Wayne’s rebirth moment. It was something better.
Considering The Importance Of Lil Wayne?s New York Period | The FADER
Part 3- Quiet Legacy Of Birdman Kissing Lil Wayne
Before he became associated with rappers in tight pants, hip-hop’s conservative wing was spooked by Lil Wayne. This was in 2006, when, seemingly out of nowhere, a photo of Wayne kissing his mentor Birdman came to light. To me, the image seems as if it belongs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art — a group of men walk swiftly past tall columns and bright palm trees as our two heroes, dressed in all-white, embrace by the hands, as well as the lips. The close distance between them and the surreal background is just perfect enough to make you wonder if the picture is even real at all.
On October 26, 2006, HipHopDX debuted the photo to the wider world under the headline “Who’s Your Daddy?” Jeff “J-23” Ryce, the site’s former editor-in-chief, wrote the article. Ryce told FADER over email that it was passed on to him by his coworker and the eventual founder of 2DopeBoyz, Shake, who procured it from discrete channels. “Shake got the picture from one of his connections and was quite certain it wasn’t a photoshop job (he was also our graphic designer),” Ryce said. “Beyond that I don't know, and didn't know then either. We didn't ask how he got all this, all that mattered was that he got it.” Shake did not return requests for comment from The FADER.
The photo’s existence came about five months before Twitter actually got off the ground at South by Southwest in March of 2007. And yet, as Ryce said, the picture became “the overwhelming reference point for any Lil Wayne haters in comments sections, or social media.” But in the grand scheme of their careers, the picture had no real impact — which is utterly surprising, considering the news broke during the end of the ultra-conservative Bush years and the fact that hip-hop has routinely struggled to deal with LGBTQ acceptance.
But for the two rappers, the photo was just an everyday occurrence — they shared a hello kiss during an episode of Rap City in 2002 and quickly pecked during an on-air interview during an appearance on 106 and Park. Several Cash Money associates have also admitted to kissing Birdman, noting that it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
When asked by New Orleans’s Q93 Radio a week after the photo leaked, Birdman defended the photo with intense gusto. “Before I had a child, Wayne and all of them were my children, you heard me? Wayne to me is my son — my first-born son — and that’s what it do for me. That’s my life, that’s my love and that’s my thing. That’s my lil’ son. I love him to death,” he said.
When the morning show DJs continued to pry about whether or not he was bothered by haters who were freaked out about the kiss, he rejected the criticism and again likened Wayne to his actual child. “My lil’ son — Lil Bryan gets the same love from me,” Birdman said. “That’s my thing. That’s what I do for my child. I give him my heart, my life and I’ll pump blood for him. I’ll issue some blood for him too. Believe that.”
The legacy of the photo endures, even as their relationship has had its ups and downs. As Charlamagne Tha God said in 2015, “they will always be known as the couple who kissed on the mouth.” Most recently in 2009, Baby was asked by the BBC about the photo and, as he had in years before, maintained his love for Wayne: “That’s my son, ya heard me. If he was right here, I’d kiss him again.”
Part 4- Carter Documentary/Wayne's Small World
Before Lil Wayne angrily dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement in an early November Nightline interview — “I don't feel connected to a damn thing that ain't got nothing to do with me,” he said, “If you do, you crazy as shit” — the rapper was far more diplomatic in his rejection of the civil rights movement. There’s no such thing as racism, he calmly told Skip Bayless of Fox Sports in September, because people of all colors supported him. Whether black celebrities should speak up and support BLM or other anti-racist initiatives is a matter of ongoing discussion. But in a digital world, where mass incarceration is addressed by mainstream musicians at the Grammys, artists dismissing popular social justice initiatives risk serious backlash.
Watching Wayne’s Nightline interview, I thought back to The Carter documentary directed by Adam Bhala Lough, which was filmed over a six-month period in 2008. Wayne has since disowned the picture and unsuccessfully sued the filmmakers, who have uploaded the entire film online. In one key example of the film’s sensitive treatment of its priceless access to the rapper, the cameras capture the exact moment when Wayne and his team learn that Tha Carter 3 sold a million copies in a week, despite leaking 10 days prior. Featured on many “all-time best” music documentary lists, The Carter is an emotional feat of filmmaking as rare as platinum-in-a-week certification. But it also reveals how entrenched Wayne is in his music — and the toll that takes on his public persona.
“I’ve been on the road since I was 11 or 12 years of age… It’s nothing to me, it’s easy,” Wayne says before a show in Los Angeles. It’s implied that he’s talking about performing, but for most artists the rigors of the road are bundled with broader obligations of press and promotion. In The Carter, we witness some of this: Wayne in a series of identical swanky hotel rooms, cordial and patient with journalists despite being constantly asked to recount the time he shot himself. “[The] biggest misconception is that I’m some kind of rude… When they meet me they say [expletive] you so humble,” he said in the Nightline interview. And The Carter footage suggests this is true: he tosses an interviewer out just once, not because of something the poor fellow said but because he’s in a sour mood.
It’s pernicious to frame the rapper as some kind of race traitor; he’s just working with the same self-centered focus that took him out of Hollygrove as a kid and brought him onto a world stage.
Endearing as the interviews can be, despite resembling alien interrogation sessions, the viewer's perception of Wayne shifts to awe as we watch him record. The Carter offers a glimpse at the rapper's legendary prolific streak of mixtape releases during the the mid aughts. Wayne in musician mode is locked in, focused, masterful. I found the most humanizing moment to be when he was asked about the small black bag he carries with him that contains his mobile studio, which allows him the freedom to record whenever he feels like it. Wayne takes a small, wrapped portion from the bag. “The most important thing of this whole bag,” he said, before revealing the vital piece to be — what else? — the microphone. It’s half a joke, but the mock reverence he holds it with is that of a craftsman lovingly explaining a tool whose reliability has come to resemble an old friend’s, something that looks obvious but contains more layers than most people who use it will ever know.
“I can’t front, I listen to me all day,” he said, when asked how he scouts artists for his label, Young Money. “Only because I listen to me all day; what I should’ve said, what I didn’t say.” In another scene he tells a reporter that he doesn’t have time for sex. Several times we see Wayne recording by himself, including when he gets the news about Tha Carter 3’s first week sales. This work ethic — or workload he makes for himself — combined with his documented drug use appears to have an isolating effect. He openly expresses that he wished he didn’t have to pay child support for his loving daughter, Reginae. His manager and best friend, Cortez Bryant, nearly quits because of Wayne’s frequent self-medication with codeine (it’s unclear whether or not Wayne still uses the drug). For his entire career, Wayne has been enshrouded in the dark room of his studio. When the curtains occasionally open and the light lets in everything that’s happening in the world, he does what anyone else would do: he averts his eyes.
Wayne has a long-documented history of apoliticism. In 2011, he told Rolling Stone that he didn’t watch Obama’s 2008 inauguration. In October 2016, he responded “Who’s that?” when asked by The New York Times for his thoughts on Donald Trump. And he only acknowledged Hillary Clinton when she quoted one of songs. As social justice entrenches itself in youth culture, Wayne’s disinterest is compromising his career. But it’s pernicious to frame the rapper as some kind of race traitor; he’s just working with the same self-centered focus that took him out of Hollygrove as a kid and brought him onto a world stage. It’s not that his personality clashes with social consciousness, but to survive and flourish amongst the horrors of his upbringing, he had to keep working with the blinkers up. How can you tell someone with that background he’s wrong to not be connected?
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Part 5- Bling Bling
In the early 2000s, an animated MTV spot cheekily illustrated the strange life of “bling bling.” First we see some anonymous rappers on stage, chanting the infamous, irreplaceable phrase; then we see the term wind its way through pro locker rooms and TV interviews and high school hallways until, finally, it shows up at the tea-time table of a white suburban woman and her matronly mother. Pointing at her new earrings, the woman chirps: “Bling bling!”
Indeed, we long ago murdered “bling bling.” But since its death, our fondness for its source material — the 1999 radio hit of the same name — has only grown. Officially credited to B.G., but widely associated with the entire illustrious Cash Money crew, it both defines an era, and represents its possible high-water mark. On both the track and the indelible video, we got a massive, preposterous, joyous chunk of stunting — a level of stunting we may never see again.
Thanks to his manifold latter-day successes, “Bling Bling” can at times feel like a footnote in Lil Wayne’s career. But the truth is, “Bling Bling” — and what was, for a time, its all-pervading presence — is elemental to a proper understanding of Wayne. Which is to say: a once-in-a-generation megastar whose very words shape our cultures and our lives.
As part of FADER’s Lil Wayne Week, we present: the oral history of “Bling Bling.”
In 1991, the brothers and entrepreneurs Bryan “Birdman” and Ronald “Slim” Williams formed the New Orleans-based Cash Money Records. After enjoying regional success in the mid-90s, the label broke through nationally on the strength of its star, the charismatic Juvenile, and his fellow Hot Boys: B.G., Turk, and the fresh-faced Lil Wayne. By the end of the decade, Cash Money was churning out material at a rapid pace.
TURK (Cash Money artist): Back then, we were recording like it was a job. We’d get these titles and concepts from Baby — we called him Baby ‘cause back then he wasn’t Birdman yet. He’d come with a list of songs or something. Me and Wayne used to always be together, and he’d just give us songs and tell us to write and we used to just write every day. He always was in the studio, like every day. He’d be like, “Y’all, come to the studio.” Man, we’d drink, we’d eat chicken, we’d shoot dice, and we’d gamble. That’s what we did every day.
LIL WAYNE (Cash Money artist): “Bling bling, I know/ And did you know I’m the creator of the term?” — “Hollywood Divorce,” Outkast feat. Lil Wayne
MANNIE FRESH (Cash Money producer): Wayne had already used the word “bling” in a song prior to that but the word had already stuck to me. I don’t know exactly which song, but I know his line was, “Tell me what kinda nigga/ Got diamonds that’ll bling, bling ya.” That was like, damn, that bling word could be something.
DINO DELVAILLE (Universal A&R): It was either Wayne or Juvie or one of the Hot Boys who [first said “bling bling”]. It was on a Hot Boys album. Every time they talked about their jewelry, their ad libs would be “bling! bling!” in the background. It was just a funny ad lib. It was cute.
UPTOWN ANGELA (New Orleans Q93 personality and programmer): The first time I heard “bling bling” being said as a phrase was from Bryan Williams. I met him in maybe ‘96 at the radio station and he would always just say it in his every day terminology. Everytime he would talk about jewelry, he would just say “bling bling.”
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Our budget was limited, those guys might have just brought their friends with cars. They were really proactive in bringing budget value. They were my partners, they helped make that video what it was.
TURK: Man, to be real, I didn’t even really wanna be in the video because my verse wasn’t in it. But I had to be a team player. In my mind I’m like, Well, at least I’m in the video. We had fun shooting it. The only thing I didn’t like is they were teasing me [about not being on the song anymore]. The whole day of the video shoot, every time it got to Wayne’s part, they’d tease me again.
RON MOHRHOFF: While Juvenile was performing on the boat, he was gesticulating and really giving a performance and because it was a wide shot on a boat he had to move around a lot. He had a brand-new diamond pinky ring on and it literally flung off while he was performing and it went in the bay. Kerplunk! And, gone. There was this look on his face like, “Oh my God, my $30,000 ring just flew off my hand.” And we were sure it was lost. But one thing about New Orleans back then is that the police were so helpful. If you look at the “We On Fire” video, we had car chases and shit going on at the airport and it was all because the cops were so cool and helpful. It was like, the community was really getting behind their home heroes.
So this one cop is like, “We’ll find that ring.” And we’re like, “You’re crazy!” A couple days later, this big white heavy-set sheriff shows up and he walks up to Juvenile and he’s got this pinky ring on his pinky. They must have scoured that bay for days. He literally found the frickin' diamond ring! We just couldn’t believe it. And he was just so proud to present it to Juvenile.
We were so blown away by all those Cash Money Millionaires, especially Lil Wayne at the time: he was really young but he blew all of our minds. He had so much charisma and so much magic and so much presence in his delivery. My AD was like, “Fuck. This guy is a star.”
DINO DELVAILLE: That song was the one that opened Lil Wayne up. People knew he was hot but everyone was really focused on Juvenile at the time. Juvenile was the one, with “Ha” and “Back That Azz Up.” But that song, that’s the record that broke Wayne.
“Juvenile was the one, with ‘Ha’ and ‘Back That Azz Up.’ But that song, that’s the record that broke Wayne.” —Dino Delvaille
UPTOWN ANGELA: Wayne was always the quiet one. B.G., he was laidback, just being in the chill zone. When “Bling Bling” came out, in my opinion, it gave Wayne the confidence to open up and score from there. Me knowing him before the song came out, it’s like one minute he’s sitting on my sofa not saying anything and then the song comes out and you see him hit the stage and do it. You’re like, “Where did this person come from?” To me it kinda gave him that boost to propel himself to what was coming next.
BIG TIGGER: It took me a moment to appreciate Cash Money. Then when I actually went down there to New Orleans, and I got to know them — Baby, Juvenile, Wayne — I saw everything in a different light. We went to Magnolia, I watched them move around. Then I got to host the Cash Money/Ruff Ryders tour. I remember Wayne used to come out of the floor. It was [singing “The Block Is Hot”] “Boooom boooooom boooom, straight off the black gold.” Wayne’s entrance used to set every arena on fire. Way before it was quote unquote “Wayne.” And it’s fun because even in our conversations along the years, me and Stunna, we like, “Wow, who the hell thought…?” It was interesting to be a fly on the wall and watch his growth, the way he took off and became a household name.
DINO DELVAILLE: They went on tour and they opened up for the Ruff Ryders and the song would come on and people would go crazy. I remember a specific set we had at Metlife Stadium in Jersey. They came out doing “Bling Bling” in a prop helicopter that flew over the crowd and landed on stage. And I just remember that moment being indescribable, special. It almost brought a tear to my eye because I was like, I remember these guys when we were in the Ninth Ward Projects in New Orleans and now look at this shit. We are in the Tri-state, and this place is packed and these people love this record. Just a few months earlier, no one knew who these guys were. No one outside of Louisiana and some key states down south, then all of a sudden here we are and they’re living out their dreams.
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BIG TIGGER: It took a long time for New York to warm up to it. It took a looooong time. And me, being from the Bronx, and Rap City — the entire emphasis in my life was lyrics, the bars, the booth. And some of their songs, weren’t the most lyrical. But it wasn’t like they weren’t saying nothing. The cadence was different, the delivery was different. And they were veeeery catchy. You can argue about what you wanna argue about, but if you got hit records and you selling out arenas all over the country, what else is there really to say?
Its virality was undeniable: the phrase became a cultural touchstone, one still referenced, used, and abused to this very day.
SLIM: Everybody started saying “Bling Bling.” It was everywhere. It had been blew up. But you know in New Orleans, we talk with slang. It fit right in with everything that we did. We might take a word and re-create something to make it have a meaning.
B.G. (As told to Rap Reviews): Yeah, it’s in the dictionary, man that shit is crazy. For a nigga like me who comes from nothing, from the hood, and I be going through the airports and shit sometimes… as a matter of fact, a flight attendant the other day said, “I like your bling bling” and I just started laughin’ because shit be funny, she ain't know who I was and I wasn’t gonna tell her who I was, I don’t even wanna be trippin' like that, but shit is crazy.
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BRYAN “BABY/BIRDMAN” WILLIAMS (As told to Big Boy's Neighborhood): “Bling bling”’for sure [slipped past us]. We was young, and ain’t really know. If so, we woulda been richer. “Bling bling” is definitely something that I wish we [had trademarked]. But I guess, keep goin’ in life and we’ll get where we tryin’ to go.
Of all our icons, has any lived as many lives? Curio, best rapper alive, mixtape genius, blockbuster. Now in 2017, at just 34-years-old, he’s an elder statesman. And he’s in limbo. His next album, the long-promised Tha Carter V, is frozen in a bitter contract dispute with Bryan “Birdman” Williams — the man Wayne, at least at one point, considered his father.
Some of us, perhaps rightly, feel his best work is behind him. Some of us hear last year’s guest spots for Chance and Solange — the rare recent times where, as he himself admits, he was really trying — and can see more greatness yet to come. And as long as we’re waiting to find out, why not look back?
This week, The FADER turns our attention to Lil Wayne. With an oral history of “Bling Bling,” we dive into his early cultural impact. With an investigation of his relationship with Drake, we examine his extensive work as a mentor. And in interviews with Mannie Fresh and Q93’s Wild Wayne, we chart the exact, singular trajectory of his career. And there’s more: essays, reminiscences, rants. Taken all together, it adds up to a kind of early, scattershot biography. This is The FADER’s Lil Wayne Week.
Broken up into 7 Parts will post each!
Part 1- Wayne's Tattoo Artist
Lil Wayne’s former tattoo artist, Dow Hokoana, has built her life around the motto, “Follow the adventure.” In doing so, the 51-year-old mother of two secured the job of her dreams: professional tattooer to the stars. Though Hokoana, a Bay Area native, started off as an animal control officer in Oregon, she later moved to Miami in 2007 in pursuit of a career as a tattoo artist. Shortly after that, just two years later, she received an unexpected surprise: Lil Wayne’s personal assistant strolled into her shop and offered her a gig as Weezy’s on-call ink artist.
Over the phone from her tattoo shop in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, Hokoana talked to The FADER about her favorite Wayne tats, the process of tattooing his entire lower body (yes, every inch), and life after Weezy.
How did Lil Wayne find you?
A tattoo artist who I had never met named Duel had done a couple tattoos on Wayne and had heard that he was looking to find an artist who could basically sign on, kind of as a full-time deal, to tattoo him until he had a complete body suit. He preferred a female because he was doing a complete body suit. Duel, who had seen my work around South Beach, recommended me.
Wayne ended up sending his PA into my shop one day and asked if I’d come out to the Hit Factory where Wayne was recording because he wanted to meet me and talk about some tattoos. At first I looked at this guy like, “Yeah right,” at which point he looked at me and went, “Look, Wayne asked for you by name, he’d really like you to come out but if you don’t I am going find someone who will.” That broke it down nicely enough for me, so I called my boys that I worked with and I gave the license plate number of Wayne’s escalade and I said, “If you don’t see me in the morning, call this number in” [laughs]. And that was the beginning of a seven-year relationship. I’ve done approximately 300 tattoos on him.
Walk me through an average tattoo session with Lil Wayne.
It really varied. Typically he wants to be tattooed in the night time, so my average time with him was meeting with him around midnight and staying until about 7 a.m. Of course on tour, it’s: do the show, he does his thing, then around 1 a.m. I go to his hotel room.
He’s the most gracious respectful man I’ve ever worked for. He’s been great to me, and I’m like the odd duck in this crew for sure. I’m an older white woman, old enough to be his mom, who’s definitely not an avid rap listener. But that’s never had any bearing on how he’s treated me. He just wanted someone he could trust, someone who could do the job to his standards, and he’s got a work ethic like a mule for sure.
What’s something unexpected that you learned about Wayne while working with him?
Just to find out what an awesome guy he really is. He really does care very deeply about the things he believes impact his life. It was always really a very interesting scene. The clowning that goes on on the bus. Wayne renting out whole bowling alleys so we could have a day off. That was one of his favorite things to do on tour. After so many days, everyone gets a total off day and very often he’d make it a family bowling day.
He can also be really silly. Once on the bus, one of the guys fell asleep and he poured Tabasco sauce in his mouth. He was like, “Nobody sleeps if I’m awake!” And this was a big guy. Wayne thought he would wake up when he poured it in his mouth but he didn’t even wake up and like an hour later he woke up wiping his mouth yelling, “What is wrong with my mouuuuth?” The list goes on. How you see him is really how he is. He never made me play mindreader.
What’s the most iconic piece that you did for him, and how did it come about?
He has a cloud and a lightening bolt on his cheek, up by his temple. One day he’s like, “I want that” and points to my daughter’s book bag and there was this lightening bolt on it. I was like, “You really want that? I’m a custom artist. I can do some cool stuff.” Sometimes he just doesn’t want it to get that deep. Sometimes it’s “just a tattoo.” But sometimes it did mean stuff. The one I liked best is on his hip. It’s one that people hardly see, but it wraps the whole side of his hip. It’s of 10 individual Vegas-style showgirls, some are just the head and headdress, some are full bodied. It’s really cool looking.
One time he hit me up at like 3:30 in the morning for a tattoo of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can. I’m like, “Oh okay, you just want me to duplicate this famous piece of art in tattoo form at 3:30 in the morning? Sure boss” [laughs].
You originally said Wayne brought you on to complete the lower part of his body piece — is it finished? Like, every part of his body?
Yes, his body suit is complete. In one other article, I wondered if we would ever do all of his body parts and I had made a guess that it would happen in three years. And sure enough, three-and-a-half years later we did every part of his body.
How did Wayne handle the more, um, sensitive areas?
Even being a female all you can do is basically hold your own breath while tattooing [that area] because it’s just... [makes a painful crying sound]. I’ve done this for a few clients. I’m sure [Wayne] was in pain, but he took it like a G. For real. It was yeeesh. But it happened. It took about 45 minutes. He’s a G.
What exactly is the tattoo on his…
I think that’s something that he would probably would want to speak on himself, if at all, so I’m going to keep that private. However I will tell you that it’s from tip to tail, it’s an image that goes straight across the board. I can tell you that across [Wayne’s] bum is a colorful checker-board. The reasoning behind that is that he wanted to try color but thought it wouldn’t show up or stick to his skin tone and I wanted to prove a point, that using the correct colors and toning even across a darker surface will absolutely show up. So both butt cheeks are black square, colored square, black square, colored square, etc.
What’s the process of tattooing a male client’s genitals like? Does it have to be… does he have to take Viagra… or…
Oh boy, this is where it gets awkward [laughs]. Contrary to popular belief, it cannot be hard at all. Basically, my gloved hand is palm up and the head is going to sit right on the palm of my hand and I’m going to put my thumb over it and push it down so that it’s flattened and wide across my hand. One time I had a guy get a little nervous and it was getting a little edgy and *— it doesn’t work inflated *— I’m going to hit that and it’s going to deflate so quickly because of the nerves and sensitivity. You could never do it, no matter how badass you are.
How has working with Lil Wayne changed your life?
Wow. Dramatically. He has always supported me. I was basically just another female tattoo artist in South Beach. I did very good solid work, but the level of art that I’ve seen come out of that city floored me. It really was amazing to feel like he chose me.
It still surprises me, like he’s been in L.A. and said, “Hey, can you get on a flight in about 2 hours,” and I told him, “I could call anybody for you — Kat Von D, anybody will come to your hotel room for what you do for me. And he’s like, “Well I don’t want them.” To feel that level of support and to be able to go on and, no joke, no matter where I go there are people who come and get tattoos from me and say they wanted me before they even really went through my portfolio because I tattooed Lil Wayne. That’s wow. I could never do that on my own.
Moving forward, what does your future look like with Wayne?
He’s called me twice since he’s moved to L.A. and I’ve stayed [in Miami]. Nicki, Drake, Twist and those guys moved to L.A. too, so with him being done [with tattoos] most of my work was, “Hey can you come hit up this guy,” like his friends. I’ve done Cee Lo Green, I’ve done a bunch of people through him. I live a very simple, low carbon footprint kind of lifestyle. Needless to say, as much as I love Wayne, he’s kind of the other side of that. I think Fort Myers beach is the perfect spot for me. But I’ll always have love for him. He’s the best.
This Is The Woman Responsible For 300 Of Lil Wayne?s Tattoos | The FADER
Part 2- Lil Wayne's New York Period
Lil Wayne does not like New York. We know this because he has said so in the most undeniable terms possible. It was 2012 — a particularly bad year for Wayne and New York City. Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg claimed that Nicki Minaj was not real hip-hop (the most classic of Old Head New York Rap Arguments), so she canceled her Summer Jam performance in retaliation. Wayne’s response? “Flat out, I don’t like New York.” It came up because of the beef (which, thanks to the internet, had escalated into a way bigger deal than it needed to be), but it was also because, earlier that year, after performing “Uh Ohhh!” with Ja Rule at the Beacon Theater, both rappers got arrested on separate gun charges that would ultimately land Wayne in jail, giving him the chance to sober up and write a prison diary/ pseudo-meditation on what it means to be locked up and famous.
Hearing Wayne denounce a city he’s not even from and never really lived in shouldn’t have been too big a deal, but this is New York, and New York prides itself on being annoying, brilliant, and difficult. How could Wayne, an annoying, brilliant, and difficult rapper hate the place? The outrage was implied in the coverage:
Lil Wayne! “Flat Out I don’t Like New York”
Lil Wayne’s Feelings Toward NY!
Birdman Seconds Lil Wayne’s ‘I Hate New York Notion’
Feud Alert! Lil Wayne Bashes New York, Senator Demands Apology
Was it because he’d already spent a significant amount of time here, recording track after track with Harlem’s forgotten hope Juelz Santana, only to have the project disappear into a mess of red tape and mismanaged expectations? Or was it because he got arrested here?
Wayne and Juelz could have been a perfect match, and I Can’t Feel My Face was meant to cement them as an iconic rap duo that had the kind of chemistry you could never hope to manufacture. Wayne’s verses folded in on themselves, piling neuroses on top of ego, while Juelz was a battering ram with a perpetual grin. He could threaten to shoot you and make it sound fun.
The album never actually came out, and was leaked, barely making a splash before the next project with Wayne’s name attached to it came through the pipeline. It’s not the greatest thing either rapper did, but it does have one particularly high moment: a distillation of everything that made the Wayne of 2006 so great. On “Get at These Niggaz” he raps: “What if they armed and what if they ready to shoot?/ We strap up, shut the fuck up, and dippity do/ What we gotta/ Who we gotta/ When we gotta/ It’s murder murder murder murder more murder, don’t think about it.” Wayne’s verse manages to inject pathos into braggadocio and death. When he raps that “don’t think about it” at the end, it’s as if he’s interrupting himself. Murder is not glamorous, and maybe bragging about it serves an entirely different purpose.
We’ve watched him grow up in the spotlight, but we won’t ever truly know him. He is constantly outrunning himself, his music travels too many unruly paths to trace properly.
Only Wayne could write such relatable nihilistic exhaustion because the violence of this world is just too much, over a beat that sounds like it was stitched together with a watery guitar sample taken from a 128 kbps mp3 downloaded on Napster in the late ’90s. His threats sound like the harsh reality of grudging acceptance.
A year or so after the non-release of I Can’t Feel My Face, Lil Wayne popped up on Ja Rule’s “Uh Ohhh!,” a track that sounded like a Timbaland cast-off which was ushered into the world to salvage the public’s waning interest in Ja Rule. It is, nonetheless, a very good track: Ja Rule melds his growl to the stuttered beat, which sounds like a robot on the verge of breaking down, his voice is the show and the spine all at once, but then Wayne comes in:
“Weezy F is in your building, I will step on your building/ From the steps, of my building, raise hell. Hell’s risen/ Call me young Raekwon, I’m a chef in Hell’s Kitchen/ And flow, sweet as devil’s food, I eat angels for dinner/ Call me what ya want, I don’t give a finger in the middle/ I’mma hold it down and blow up, the anchor is the missile/ When I say we got them brrrrrr! I ain’t trying to whistle/ Longbody Maybach, it make me feel so little/ I’m ballin on the suckers and I won’t pick up my dribble/ Retarded on the beat, I spit hospitals.”
The video is low-budget, just Ja Rule and Wayne exchanging joyful verses and weird leg kicks on top of what looks like one of those double decker tour buses as it circles New York aimlessly. There’s a timecode at the bottom, as if it’s a rough cut. Maybe it is.
Wayne is a dense, often subtly personal writer. He says what he feels in interviews, even when it makes him look bad. He is, on some level, emotionally available, just maybe not in the way his fans would like him to be. We’ve watched him grow up in the spotlight, but we won’t ever truly know him. He is constantly outrunning himself, his music travels too many unruly paths to trace properly. In those days when he was roaming around New York, hanging out with Juelz Santana, recording with Ja Rule, or maybe hopping down to Miami to drink Sparks with DJ Khaled and a gaggle of dolphins, it felt like we could pin him down — or at least place him somewhere on the Eastern seaboard — for a few minutes.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from Wayne’s complete aural ubiquity. All that history buried under piles of digital detritus left to decay behind forgotten MediaFire links and disorganized DatPiff archives. Wayne’s New York songs exist almost entirely in this space, a hazy period that gets harder to retrace every day. They are the sound of what happens when you become unmoored from the place you’re from, and how that can destroy you just before it builds you back up again. This was not quite Wayne’s rebirth moment. It was something better.
Considering The Importance Of Lil Wayne?s New York Period | The FADER
Part 3- Quiet Legacy Of Birdman Kissing Lil Wayne
Before he became associated with rappers in tight pants, hip-hop’s conservative wing was spooked by Lil Wayne. This was in 2006, when, seemingly out of nowhere, a photo of Wayne kissing his mentor Birdman came to light. To me, the image seems as if it belongs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art — a group of men walk swiftly past tall columns and bright palm trees as our two heroes, dressed in all-white, embrace by the hands, as well as the lips. The close distance between them and the surreal background is just perfect enough to make you wonder if the picture is even real at all.
On October 26, 2006, HipHopDX debuted the photo to the wider world under the headline “Who’s Your Daddy?” Jeff “J-23” Ryce, the site’s former editor-in-chief, wrote the article. Ryce told FADER over email that it was passed on to him by his coworker and the eventual founder of 2DopeBoyz, Shake, who procured it from discrete channels. “Shake got the picture from one of his connections and was quite certain it wasn’t a photoshop job (he was also our graphic designer),” Ryce said. “Beyond that I don't know, and didn't know then either. We didn't ask how he got all this, all that mattered was that he got it.” Shake did not return requests for comment from The FADER.
The photo’s existence came about five months before Twitter actually got off the ground at South by Southwest in March of 2007. And yet, as Ryce said, the picture became “the overwhelming reference point for any Lil Wayne haters in comments sections, or social media.” But in the grand scheme of their careers, the picture had no real impact — which is utterly surprising, considering the news broke during the end of the ultra-conservative Bush years and the fact that hip-hop has routinely struggled to deal with LGBTQ acceptance.
But for the two rappers, the photo was just an everyday occurrence — they shared a hello kiss during an episode of Rap City in 2002 and quickly pecked during an on-air interview during an appearance on 106 and Park. Several Cash Money associates have also admitted to kissing Birdman, noting that it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
When asked by New Orleans’s Q93 Radio a week after the photo leaked, Birdman defended the photo with intense gusto. “Before I had a child, Wayne and all of them were my children, you heard me? Wayne to me is my son — my first-born son — and that’s what it do for me. That’s my life, that’s my love and that’s my thing. That’s my lil’ son. I love him to death,” he said.
When the morning show DJs continued to pry about whether or not he was bothered by haters who were freaked out about the kiss, he rejected the criticism and again likened Wayne to his actual child. “My lil’ son — Lil Bryan gets the same love from me,” Birdman said. “That’s my thing. That’s what I do for my child. I give him my heart, my life and I’ll pump blood for him. I’ll issue some blood for him too. Believe that.”
The legacy of the photo endures, even as their relationship has had its ups and downs. As Charlamagne Tha God said in 2015, “they will always be known as the couple who kissed on the mouth.” Most recently in 2009, Baby was asked by the BBC about the photo and, as he had in years before, maintained his love for Wayne: “That’s my son, ya heard me. If he was right here, I’d kiss him again.”
Part 4- Carter Documentary/Wayne's Small World
Before Lil Wayne angrily dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement in an early November Nightline interview — “I don't feel connected to a damn thing that ain't got nothing to do with me,” he said, “If you do, you crazy as shit” — the rapper was far more diplomatic in his rejection of the civil rights movement. There’s no such thing as racism, he calmly told Skip Bayless of Fox Sports in September, because people of all colors supported him. Whether black celebrities should speak up and support BLM or other anti-racist initiatives is a matter of ongoing discussion. But in a digital world, where mass incarceration is addressed by mainstream musicians at the Grammys, artists dismissing popular social justice initiatives risk serious backlash.
Watching Wayne’s Nightline interview, I thought back to The Carter documentary directed by Adam Bhala Lough, which was filmed over a six-month period in 2008. Wayne has since disowned the picture and unsuccessfully sued the filmmakers, who have uploaded the entire film online. In one key example of the film’s sensitive treatment of its priceless access to the rapper, the cameras capture the exact moment when Wayne and his team learn that Tha Carter 3 sold a million copies in a week, despite leaking 10 days prior. Featured on many “all-time best” music documentary lists, The Carter is an emotional feat of filmmaking as rare as platinum-in-a-week certification. But it also reveals how entrenched Wayne is in his music — and the toll that takes on his public persona.
“I’ve been on the road since I was 11 or 12 years of age… It’s nothing to me, it’s easy,” Wayne says before a show in Los Angeles. It’s implied that he’s talking about performing, but for most artists the rigors of the road are bundled with broader obligations of press and promotion. In The Carter, we witness some of this: Wayne in a series of identical swanky hotel rooms, cordial and patient with journalists despite being constantly asked to recount the time he shot himself. “[The] biggest misconception is that I’m some kind of rude… When they meet me they say [expletive] you so humble,” he said in the Nightline interview. And The Carter footage suggests this is true: he tosses an interviewer out just once, not because of something the poor fellow said but because he’s in a sour mood.
It’s pernicious to frame the rapper as some kind of race traitor; he’s just working with the same self-centered focus that took him out of Hollygrove as a kid and brought him onto a world stage.
Endearing as the interviews can be, despite resembling alien interrogation sessions, the viewer's perception of Wayne shifts to awe as we watch him record. The Carter offers a glimpse at the rapper's legendary prolific streak of mixtape releases during the the mid aughts. Wayne in musician mode is locked in, focused, masterful. I found the most humanizing moment to be when he was asked about the small black bag he carries with him that contains his mobile studio, which allows him the freedom to record whenever he feels like it. Wayne takes a small, wrapped portion from the bag. “The most important thing of this whole bag,” he said, before revealing the vital piece to be — what else? — the microphone. It’s half a joke, but the mock reverence he holds it with is that of a craftsman lovingly explaining a tool whose reliability has come to resemble an old friend’s, something that looks obvious but contains more layers than most people who use it will ever know.
“I can’t front, I listen to me all day,” he said, when asked how he scouts artists for his label, Young Money. “Only because I listen to me all day; what I should’ve said, what I didn’t say.” In another scene he tells a reporter that he doesn’t have time for sex. Several times we see Wayne recording by himself, including when he gets the news about Tha Carter 3’s first week sales. This work ethic — or workload he makes for himself — combined with his documented drug use appears to have an isolating effect. He openly expresses that he wished he didn’t have to pay child support for his loving daughter, Reginae. His manager and best friend, Cortez Bryant, nearly quits because of Wayne’s frequent self-medication with codeine (it’s unclear whether or not Wayne still uses the drug). For his entire career, Wayne has been enshrouded in the dark room of his studio. When the curtains occasionally open and the light lets in everything that’s happening in the world, he does what anyone else would do: he averts his eyes.
Wayne has a long-documented history of apoliticism. In 2011, he told Rolling Stone that he didn’t watch Obama’s 2008 inauguration. In October 2016, he responded “Who’s that?” when asked by The New York Times for his thoughts on Donald Trump. And he only acknowledged Hillary Clinton when she quoted one of songs. As social justice entrenches itself in youth culture, Wayne’s disinterest is compromising his career. But it’s pernicious to frame the rapper as some kind of race traitor; he’s just working with the same self-centered focus that took him out of Hollygrove as a kid and brought him onto a world stage. It’s not that his personality clashes with social consciousness, but to survive and flourish amongst the horrors of his upbringing, he had to keep working with the blinkers up. How can you tell someone with that background he’s wrong to not be connected?
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Part 5- Bling Bling
In the early 2000s, an animated MTV spot cheekily illustrated the strange life of “bling bling.” First we see some anonymous rappers on stage, chanting the infamous, irreplaceable phrase; then we see the term wind its way through pro locker rooms and TV interviews and high school hallways until, finally, it shows up at the tea-time table of a white suburban woman and her matronly mother. Pointing at her new earrings, the woman chirps: “Bling bling!”
Indeed, we long ago murdered “bling bling.” But since its death, our fondness for its source material — the 1999 radio hit of the same name — has only grown. Officially credited to B.G., but widely associated with the entire illustrious Cash Money crew, it both defines an era, and represents its possible high-water mark. On both the track and the indelible video, we got a massive, preposterous, joyous chunk of stunting — a level of stunting we may never see again.
Thanks to his manifold latter-day successes, “Bling Bling” can at times feel like a footnote in Lil Wayne’s career. But the truth is, “Bling Bling” — and what was, for a time, its all-pervading presence — is elemental to a proper understanding of Wayne. Which is to say: a once-in-a-generation megastar whose very words shape our cultures and our lives.
As part of FADER’s Lil Wayne Week, we present: the oral history of “Bling Bling.”
In 1991, the brothers and entrepreneurs Bryan “Birdman” and Ronald “Slim” Williams formed the New Orleans-based Cash Money Records. After enjoying regional success in the mid-90s, the label broke through nationally on the strength of its star, the charismatic Juvenile, and his fellow Hot Boys: B.G., Turk, and the fresh-faced Lil Wayne. By the end of the decade, Cash Money was churning out material at a rapid pace.
TURK (Cash Money artist): Back then, we were recording like it was a job. We’d get these titles and concepts from Baby — we called him Baby ‘cause back then he wasn’t Birdman yet. He’d come with a list of songs or something. Me and Wayne used to always be together, and he’d just give us songs and tell us to write and we used to just write every day. He always was in the studio, like every day. He’d be like, “Y’all, come to the studio.” Man, we’d drink, we’d eat chicken, we’d shoot dice, and we’d gamble. That’s what we did every day.
LIL WAYNE (Cash Money artist): “Bling bling, I know/ And did you know I’m the creator of the term?” — “Hollywood Divorce,” Outkast feat. Lil Wayne
MANNIE FRESH (Cash Money producer): Wayne had already used the word “bling” in a song prior to that but the word had already stuck to me. I don’t know exactly which song, but I know his line was, “Tell me what kinda nigga/ Got diamonds that’ll bling, bling ya.” That was like, damn, that bling word could be something.
DINO DELVAILLE (Universal A&R): It was either Wayne or Juvie or one of the Hot Boys who [first said “bling bling”]. It was on a Hot Boys album. Every time they talked about their jewelry, their ad libs would be “bling! bling!” in the background. It was just a funny ad lib. It was cute.
UPTOWN ANGELA (New Orleans Q93 personality and programmer): The first time I heard “bling bling” being said as a phrase was from Bryan Williams. I met him in maybe ‘96 at the radio station and he would always just say it in his every day terminology. Everytime he would talk about jewelry, he would just say “bling bling.”
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Our budget was limited, those guys might have just brought their friends with cars. They were really proactive in bringing budget value. They were my partners, they helped make that video what it was.
TURK: Man, to be real, I didn’t even really wanna be in the video because my verse wasn’t in it. But I had to be a team player. In my mind I’m like, Well, at least I’m in the video. We had fun shooting it. The only thing I didn’t like is they were teasing me [about not being on the song anymore]. The whole day of the video shoot, every time it got to Wayne’s part, they’d tease me again.
RON MOHRHOFF: While Juvenile was performing on the boat, he was gesticulating and really giving a performance and because it was a wide shot on a boat he had to move around a lot. He had a brand-new diamond pinky ring on and it literally flung off while he was performing and it went in the bay. Kerplunk! And, gone. There was this look on his face like, “Oh my God, my $30,000 ring just flew off my hand.” And we were sure it was lost. But one thing about New Orleans back then is that the police were so helpful. If you look at the “We On Fire” video, we had car chases and shit going on at the airport and it was all because the cops were so cool and helpful. It was like, the community was really getting behind their home heroes.
So this one cop is like, “We’ll find that ring.” And we’re like, “You’re crazy!” A couple days later, this big white heavy-set sheriff shows up and he walks up to Juvenile and he’s got this pinky ring on his pinky. They must have scoured that bay for days. He literally found the frickin' diamond ring! We just couldn’t believe it. And he was just so proud to present it to Juvenile.
We were so blown away by all those Cash Money Millionaires, especially Lil Wayne at the time: he was really young but he blew all of our minds. He had so much charisma and so much magic and so much presence in his delivery. My AD was like, “Fuck. This guy is a star.”
DINO DELVAILLE: That song was the one that opened Lil Wayne up. People knew he was hot but everyone was really focused on Juvenile at the time. Juvenile was the one, with “Ha” and “Back That Azz Up.” But that song, that’s the record that broke Wayne.
“Juvenile was the one, with ‘Ha’ and ‘Back That Azz Up.’ But that song, that’s the record that broke Wayne.” —Dino Delvaille
UPTOWN ANGELA: Wayne was always the quiet one. B.G., he was laidback, just being in the chill zone. When “Bling Bling” came out, in my opinion, it gave Wayne the confidence to open up and score from there. Me knowing him before the song came out, it’s like one minute he’s sitting on my sofa not saying anything and then the song comes out and you see him hit the stage and do it. You’re like, “Where did this person come from?” To me it kinda gave him that boost to propel himself to what was coming next.
BIG TIGGER: It took me a moment to appreciate Cash Money. Then when I actually went down there to New Orleans, and I got to know them — Baby, Juvenile, Wayne — I saw everything in a different light. We went to Magnolia, I watched them move around. Then I got to host the Cash Money/Ruff Ryders tour. I remember Wayne used to come out of the floor. It was [singing “The Block Is Hot”] “Boooom boooooom boooom, straight off the black gold.” Wayne’s entrance used to set every arena on fire. Way before it was quote unquote “Wayne.” And it’s fun because even in our conversations along the years, me and Stunna, we like, “Wow, who the hell thought…?” It was interesting to be a fly on the wall and watch his growth, the way he took off and became a household name.
DINO DELVAILLE: They went on tour and they opened up for the Ruff Ryders and the song would come on and people would go crazy. I remember a specific set we had at Metlife Stadium in Jersey. They came out doing “Bling Bling” in a prop helicopter that flew over the crowd and landed on stage. And I just remember that moment being indescribable, special. It almost brought a tear to my eye because I was like, I remember these guys when we were in the Ninth Ward Projects in New Orleans and now look at this shit. We are in the Tri-state, and this place is packed and these people love this record. Just a few months earlier, no one knew who these guys were. No one outside of Louisiana and some key states down south, then all of a sudden here we are and they’re living out their dreams.
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BIG TIGGER: It took a long time for New York to warm up to it. It took a looooong time. And me, being from the Bronx, and Rap City — the entire emphasis in my life was lyrics, the bars, the booth. And some of their songs, weren’t the most lyrical. But it wasn’t like they weren’t saying nothing. The cadence was different, the delivery was different. And they were veeeery catchy. You can argue about what you wanna argue about, but if you got hit records and you selling out arenas all over the country, what else is there really to say?
Its virality was undeniable: the phrase became a cultural touchstone, one still referenced, used, and abused to this very day.
SLIM: Everybody started saying “Bling Bling.” It was everywhere. It had been blew up. But you know in New Orleans, we talk with slang. It fit right in with everything that we did. We might take a word and re-create something to make it have a meaning.
B.G. (As told to Rap Reviews): Yeah, it’s in the dictionary, man that shit is crazy. For a nigga like me who comes from nothing, from the hood, and I be going through the airports and shit sometimes… as a matter of fact, a flight attendant the other day said, “I like your bling bling” and I just started laughin’ because shit be funny, she ain't know who I was and I wasn’t gonna tell her who I was, I don’t even wanna be trippin' like that, but shit is crazy.
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BRYAN “BABY/BIRDMAN” WILLIAMS (As told to Big Boy's Neighborhood): “Bling bling”’for sure [slipped past us]. We was young, and ain’t really know. If so, we woulda been richer. “Bling bling” is definitely something that I wish we [had trademarked]. But I guess, keep goin’ in life and we’ll get where we tryin’ to go.
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