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The snarl was familiar before I ever put my head on the platinum-buttoned ocelot fur couch. “Get money. Fuck bitches.” Eyes closed, I know that my diamond-grilled therapist isn’t taking notes and I wonder how much he’s even listening, while he hypnotically repeats the mantra—Get money. Fuck bitches. Get money. Fuck bitches—each syllable gurgling like a telltale heart gone hood. I don’t remember if I asked him about the major general of the Queen’s Navy chasing me up the mountain or when I diffused a bomb while slathered in white paint or why, in my waking hours, I would actually break up with perfectly scrumptious, wifey-material because she once wore a silly hat. I really don’t think it’d matter. Dr. Weezy F. Baby (please say the motherfuckin’. . .Ph.D) has one lesson: Get money. Fuck bitches. And that’s why I’m on his decadent couch and he’s not taking notes.
“I need something, anything, other than those four words, damn it!” I scream. My outburst shocks me, but it has a point and I intend to pursue it. “What about the dreams and the sweats? What about the deer-skin lamps with the fangs?”
Dr. Weezy F. Baby stays silent.
In reality, Lil’ Wayne (aka Weezy F. Baby) isn’t licensed to call me crazy, at least not yet. He is studying psychology (or maybe political science?) at the University of Houston and, according to his last report card, he’s “on the fuckin’ honor roll.” Wayne has his own distorted, nonsensical dreams too, and one is to be a celebrity psychologist “’cause they pay.” Get Money. Fuck Bitches.
If we look only at the music released from December 6, 2005 to November 21, 2006, then the boasts of this self-proclaimed “best rapper alive” are dead-on. The former date marks the release of his fifth solo album, Tha Carter II, and the latter is (fittingly) when his hero, Jay-Z, officially ends his retirement—but for exactly 350 days, it’s not even a question. [Editor's note: It may remain true to this day.] No one rapped better than Lil’ Wayne over this period. Carter II was immediately lauded as Wayne’s magnum opus, the potential of contemporary hip-hop’s most unique voice finally realized on record. Born Dwayne Michael Carter in New Orleans’s famed and maimed 17th Ward, the newly named president of Cash Money Records followed Jay-Z’s blueprint, mining a mixture of string-heavy soul samples and frantic club hits for quotable quips and an inexhaustible collection of danger-soaked-and artistically risky-street tales. Dedication 2, his Gangsta Grillz mixtape with DJ Drama released this summer, was even better. Tackling the most monstrous beats of the year (“Hustlin’,” “What You Know”) and some jaw-dropping originals (“Cannon”), Wayne tears through rap with an incalculable fervor, and by the time it’s all over, Dedication 2 is easily the hip-hop album of the year. Even with just a slim case.
“Don’t let that bird shit,” Wayne says. “He got a weak stomach.” When Dr. Baby talks, he speaks in riddle and I lose track of who’s the patient between us. This is his response to another of my nightmares, and sometimes I prefer the 47-foot-tall birds pecking at the webbing of my feet, at least to this nonsense.
“What kind of grown man is petrified of birds?” I ask. “I need a real answer. I’m sick. I don’t spit, I vomit. Got it? One egg short of the omelet.”
He clears his throat and I sit up to hear his words of wisdom. “Fuck bitches. Get money.” I lie back down and maybe lose my grip again.
The truth is, Wayne raps with the swagger of a man on a mission. Much is made of swagger; it made Rakim’s microphone science devastating and not devastatingly boring, it made Big Daddy Kane’s dance moves not only OK, but hard as hell, it makes Lil’ Wayne’s near-nursery rhymes (“Dear Mr. Toilet/I’m the shit“) into scathing daggers. Gravelly and hoarse or high-pitched and otherworldly, he makes the simplest words sound alien. He can reflect an apocalyptic air of relaxation, practically making his lungs-open, leaned-back posture in the booth audible on record. Just as easily, he’ll push a manic urgency through walls of anger and unrelenting will, not like the anxiety-inducing stress of Ghostface, but with a calm and calculated manner that is even scarier. He exhales repose and inhales exigency. “I eat rappers and go in my yard and bury their bones.” His voice is anchored by an intimidating nasality and a mordacious N’awlins drawl that combine to form something like Death’s sinewy snarl-but only if Death had “Fear God” tattooed on his eyelids. Weezy does. The effect of his voice, the tattoos on his eyelids, it’s all maligned and menacing, and yet the man wouldn’t stand six feet tall standing on 16 phone books.
“Let me get ‘em/I hope his kids not with him.” What happens if his kids are with him? Does that mean that the job has to wait or that the job just gets uglier? Don’t let the laconic lines fool you-he’s a lyricist. His punch lines are rarely tired, instead doused in an energized cleverness-”Broke dudes only make jokes funny/I make more than I can fit in this quote, money“-that makes heads shake or just as easily provides narration for fight music.
“I say that after every song, I be like, ‘I murdered that shit,’” says the Weezy of this dimension, though it’s hard to tell. The question was about a moment of clarity, of understanding and appreciating one man’s own creation. For Wayne, the act of creating is spontaneous (he freestyles every line, never writing a word before stepping into the booth), but his response to questions is measured. He leans forward, wary of speaking the braggadocio of his raps in a beat-less conversation. “But you know, I ain’t on myself like that, to be like, ‘Yeah I’m a beast.’ I just do it in my raps.”
We’re sitting in his tour bus now, at a foldout table possessing a tidiness that suggests a center-of-command for business. Teenie-bopper singing sensation and backflipping extraordinaire Chris Brown sits to my right. BET is filming the back of my head. Nearly a dozen others look on and anticipate the minute tasks that make Wayne’s life easier-rolling blunts, timing journalists-and I take note that I should tell my shrink about this, too. Everyone is in Los Angeles as part of Brown’s Up Close and Personal Tour (supported by Ne-Yo, Juelz Santana, Dem Franchise Boys and Wayne) and, more specifically, everyone is in Hollywood for Young Money/Cash Money artist Currency’s debut video shoot. I’m only there to debunk a statement Wayne makes toward the end of Carter II, and the longer I stay the more I find myself praying there’s something to debunk at all.
On “Feel Me,” a sensuous studio journalist asks about Wayne’s motivation and he is vehement that it can’t be anything but money. “Is that really a question? Do you really have that written down in your notebook? You should be ashamed of yourself. You smell me, I smell like money.”
Church music cues the very next second and Weezy leaves his heart on a strained track about the kind of devastation that’s slightly more tangible than that of his lyrical prowess. “I got to bring the hood back after Katrina/Weezy F. Baby/Now the F is for FEMA/Sick nigga bitch/I spit that leukemia.”
“Surely, it’s not just about money,” I insist.
“If I wasn’t getting paid, I wouldn’t do it. I represent the new generation of hip-hop,” he says. “Back then, you had a generation that was like, ‘We don’t need no money, we’ll do it for nothing.’ You know why? Because they wasn’t getting money. They don’t know how money feel, how it taste. I’m a millionaire!”
I still don’t want to believe him. How dare he shatter that romanticized, Kafkaesque image of the starving artist? His thoughtless dismissal deflates everything that an artist is supposed to embody. Where would he be, after all, if he hadn’t made his voice heard so many years ago? “I’m a smart man. I’d be in school, probably be scamming, making cons in some kind of way, probably have like 10 black cards,” he says. An eerily diabolic grin quietly dominates the conversation, “. . .all in your name.”
It’s easy to forget that Wayne is just 24; he carries a weight in his shoulders that expresses a world beyond his 288 months. Maybe he just works out a lot. “In reality, I am [an old soul]. I got a seven-year-old daughter, I’m married and divorced, I done been shot twice, I went through three different [record] deals. . .I am old.” As vulnerable as he sometimes allows himself to be on record (“I know people who died in those pools/I know people who died in those schools“), he rarely lifts the iron façade of seriousness.
Today’s video shoot is one of those rare moments at this point in his ascension, and a lapse in his armor shows as he gropes a green-screened silhouette of Remy Martin (eyeing the director’s monitor to ensure his gesture’s hilarity), leads a Red Hot Chili Peppers sing-a-long, and loudly fantasizes about slapping the Pussycat Dolls in their foreheads with a stack of $100 bills if they come to his birthday party. Suddenly, someone sneezes and Wayne is the first to say, “Bless you.” During every break, everyone’s jokes get punctuated with a loud, “Baaaaawll-in!” With every shout of the day’s catchphrase-coined by Jim Jones on “We Fly High”-Wayne leans back and looks to the sky, the maze of tattoos on his tattered arms almost reaching the cotton-candy punk belt that hardly holds up his pants. The Cash Money Records publicist is thrilled that I get to see “Wayne’s playful side.”
“I have fun every day because it could be my last one,” he says in a familiar refrain. “Get money! That’s the funnest thing-past, present, future-it’s the most funnest shit ever! You ever tried it?”
I have, and now I’m back on the couch, looking to the sky—sans pink belt—at Dr. Weezy F. Baby’s mosaic ceiling. It’s an artistic rendering of legal-tender $100 bills. I ask Dr. Baby about the strive for artistic contentment, about the stress of creating something only because it needs to be created. Is it really an egotistical extension of my search for acceptance? Can that deep-seeded yearning just be self-destruction in order to get people to like me? Which Weezy am I talking to, the wise-beyond-his-years pseudo-Freud, or a developmentally stunted, real-life mogul who happens to be the king of his game? How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given all the time I spend quoting Lil’ Wayne?
“Fuck bitches. Get money.”
“I need something, anything, other than those four words, damn it!” I scream. My outburst shocks me, but it has a point and I intend to pursue it. “What about the dreams and the sweats? What about the deer-skin lamps with the fangs?”
Dr. Weezy F. Baby stays silent.
In reality, Lil’ Wayne (aka Weezy F. Baby) isn’t licensed to call me crazy, at least not yet. He is studying psychology (or maybe political science?) at the University of Houston and, according to his last report card, he’s “on the fuckin’ honor roll.” Wayne has his own distorted, nonsensical dreams too, and one is to be a celebrity psychologist “’cause they pay.” Get Money. Fuck Bitches.
If we look only at the music released from December 6, 2005 to November 21, 2006, then the boasts of this self-proclaimed “best rapper alive” are dead-on. The former date marks the release of his fifth solo album, Tha Carter II, and the latter is (fittingly) when his hero, Jay-Z, officially ends his retirement—but for exactly 350 days, it’s not even a question. [Editor's note: It may remain true to this day.] No one rapped better than Lil’ Wayne over this period. Carter II was immediately lauded as Wayne’s magnum opus, the potential of contemporary hip-hop’s most unique voice finally realized on record. Born Dwayne Michael Carter in New Orleans’s famed and maimed 17th Ward, the newly named president of Cash Money Records followed Jay-Z’s blueprint, mining a mixture of string-heavy soul samples and frantic club hits for quotable quips and an inexhaustible collection of danger-soaked-and artistically risky-street tales. Dedication 2, his Gangsta Grillz mixtape with DJ Drama released this summer, was even better. Tackling the most monstrous beats of the year (“Hustlin’,” “What You Know”) and some jaw-dropping originals (“Cannon”), Wayne tears through rap with an incalculable fervor, and by the time it’s all over, Dedication 2 is easily the hip-hop album of the year. Even with just a slim case.
“Don’t let that bird shit,” Wayne says. “He got a weak stomach.” When Dr. Baby talks, he speaks in riddle and I lose track of who’s the patient between us. This is his response to another of my nightmares, and sometimes I prefer the 47-foot-tall birds pecking at the webbing of my feet, at least to this nonsense.
“What kind of grown man is petrified of birds?” I ask. “I need a real answer. I’m sick. I don’t spit, I vomit. Got it? One egg short of the omelet.”
He clears his throat and I sit up to hear his words of wisdom. “Fuck bitches. Get money.” I lie back down and maybe lose my grip again.
The truth is, Wayne raps with the swagger of a man on a mission. Much is made of swagger; it made Rakim’s microphone science devastating and not devastatingly boring, it made Big Daddy Kane’s dance moves not only OK, but hard as hell, it makes Lil’ Wayne’s near-nursery rhymes (“Dear Mr. Toilet/I’m the shit“) into scathing daggers. Gravelly and hoarse or high-pitched and otherworldly, he makes the simplest words sound alien. He can reflect an apocalyptic air of relaxation, practically making his lungs-open, leaned-back posture in the booth audible on record. Just as easily, he’ll push a manic urgency through walls of anger and unrelenting will, not like the anxiety-inducing stress of Ghostface, but with a calm and calculated manner that is even scarier. He exhales repose and inhales exigency. “I eat rappers and go in my yard and bury their bones.” His voice is anchored by an intimidating nasality and a mordacious N’awlins drawl that combine to form something like Death’s sinewy snarl-but only if Death had “Fear God” tattooed on his eyelids. Weezy does. The effect of his voice, the tattoos on his eyelids, it’s all maligned and menacing, and yet the man wouldn’t stand six feet tall standing on 16 phone books.
“Let me get ‘em/I hope his kids not with him.” What happens if his kids are with him? Does that mean that the job has to wait or that the job just gets uglier? Don’t let the laconic lines fool you-he’s a lyricist. His punch lines are rarely tired, instead doused in an energized cleverness-”Broke dudes only make jokes funny/I make more than I can fit in this quote, money“-that makes heads shake or just as easily provides narration for fight music.
“I say that after every song, I be like, ‘I murdered that shit,’” says the Weezy of this dimension, though it’s hard to tell. The question was about a moment of clarity, of understanding and appreciating one man’s own creation. For Wayne, the act of creating is spontaneous (he freestyles every line, never writing a word before stepping into the booth), but his response to questions is measured. He leans forward, wary of speaking the braggadocio of his raps in a beat-less conversation. “But you know, I ain’t on myself like that, to be like, ‘Yeah I’m a beast.’ I just do it in my raps.”
We’re sitting in his tour bus now, at a foldout table possessing a tidiness that suggests a center-of-command for business. Teenie-bopper singing sensation and backflipping extraordinaire Chris Brown sits to my right. BET is filming the back of my head. Nearly a dozen others look on and anticipate the minute tasks that make Wayne’s life easier-rolling blunts, timing journalists-and I take note that I should tell my shrink about this, too. Everyone is in Los Angeles as part of Brown’s Up Close and Personal Tour (supported by Ne-Yo, Juelz Santana, Dem Franchise Boys and Wayne) and, more specifically, everyone is in Hollywood for Young Money/Cash Money artist Currency’s debut video shoot. I’m only there to debunk a statement Wayne makes toward the end of Carter II, and the longer I stay the more I find myself praying there’s something to debunk at all.
On “Feel Me,” a sensuous studio journalist asks about Wayne’s motivation and he is vehement that it can’t be anything but money. “Is that really a question? Do you really have that written down in your notebook? You should be ashamed of yourself. You smell me, I smell like money.”
Church music cues the very next second and Weezy leaves his heart on a strained track about the kind of devastation that’s slightly more tangible than that of his lyrical prowess. “I got to bring the hood back after Katrina/Weezy F. Baby/Now the F is for FEMA/Sick nigga bitch/I spit that leukemia.”
“Surely, it’s not just about money,” I insist.
“If I wasn’t getting paid, I wouldn’t do it. I represent the new generation of hip-hop,” he says. “Back then, you had a generation that was like, ‘We don’t need no money, we’ll do it for nothing.’ You know why? Because they wasn’t getting money. They don’t know how money feel, how it taste. I’m a millionaire!”
I still don’t want to believe him. How dare he shatter that romanticized, Kafkaesque image of the starving artist? His thoughtless dismissal deflates everything that an artist is supposed to embody. Where would he be, after all, if he hadn’t made his voice heard so many years ago? “I’m a smart man. I’d be in school, probably be scamming, making cons in some kind of way, probably have like 10 black cards,” he says. An eerily diabolic grin quietly dominates the conversation, “. . .all in your name.”
It’s easy to forget that Wayne is just 24; he carries a weight in his shoulders that expresses a world beyond his 288 months. Maybe he just works out a lot. “In reality, I am [an old soul]. I got a seven-year-old daughter, I’m married and divorced, I done been shot twice, I went through three different [record] deals. . .I am old.” As vulnerable as he sometimes allows himself to be on record (“I know people who died in those pools/I know people who died in those schools“), he rarely lifts the iron façade of seriousness.
Today’s video shoot is one of those rare moments at this point in his ascension, and a lapse in his armor shows as he gropes a green-screened silhouette of Remy Martin (eyeing the director’s monitor to ensure his gesture’s hilarity), leads a Red Hot Chili Peppers sing-a-long, and loudly fantasizes about slapping the Pussycat Dolls in their foreheads with a stack of $100 bills if they come to his birthday party. Suddenly, someone sneezes and Wayne is the first to say, “Bless you.” During every break, everyone’s jokes get punctuated with a loud, “Baaaaawll-in!” With every shout of the day’s catchphrase-coined by Jim Jones on “We Fly High”-Wayne leans back and looks to the sky, the maze of tattoos on his tattered arms almost reaching the cotton-candy punk belt that hardly holds up his pants. The Cash Money Records publicist is thrilled that I get to see “Wayne’s playful side.”
“I have fun every day because it could be my last one,” he says in a familiar refrain. “Get money! That’s the funnest thing-past, present, future-it’s the most funnest shit ever! You ever tried it?”
I have, and now I’m back on the couch, looking to the sky—sans pink belt—at Dr. Weezy F. Baby’s mosaic ceiling. It’s an artistic rendering of legal-tender $100 bills. I ask Dr. Baby about the strive for artistic contentment, about the stress of creating something only because it needs to be created. Is it really an egotistical extension of my search for acceptance? Can that deep-seeded yearning just be self-destruction in order to get people to like me? Which Weezy am I talking to, the wise-beyond-his-years pseudo-Freud, or a developmentally stunted, real-life mogul who happens to be the king of his game? How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given all the time I spend quoting Lil’ Wayne?
“Fuck bitches. Get money.”
Format: How was your experience with Lil Wayne? to be honest you don't look like a Lil Wayne photographer.
RJ: Well, Lil Wayne is my favorite rapper, I guess I should say musician, I don't want to call him a rapper. He's brilliant, I love his mixtapes. That situation was on my birthday, last year. He was doing a video shoot for Currency, one of his protages on Cash Money Records. Lil Wayne was doing a cameo for the video shoot and I showed up. It was one of the most awkward photo shoots that I did, because I was never introduced to him. He never spoke a word to me. I never got a hand shake or anything. They were doing something I was there kind of sneaking it. I didn't have time to do my usual shtick. I only shot three rolls of film.
RJ: Well, Lil Wayne is my favorite rapper, I guess I should say musician, I don't want to call him a rapper. He's brilliant, I love his mixtapes. That situation was on my birthday, last year. He was doing a video shoot for Currency, one of his protages on Cash Money Records. Lil Wayne was doing a cameo for the video shoot and I showed up. It was one of the most awkward photo shoots that I did, because I was never introduced to him. He never spoke a word to me. I never got a hand shake or anything. They were doing something I was there kind of sneaking it. I didn't have time to do my usual shtick. I only shot three rolls of film.
More photos from the shoot:
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