Lil Wayne: There Is None Higher

[Elano]

As the West Dixie Highwaycurves toward North Miami, the city’s glitzy epicenter becomes a distant memory. The cruise ships, sandy nightclubs and gated island communities of South Beach give way to all-night coin-op laundromats, strip clubs lit in queasy green neon (NUDE REVUE! FRICTION RUBBING!) and run-down single-story homes. Al Capone, John Collins, Gianni Versace—swells like that never set a loafer on this soil. At 149th Street, though, an unexpected outpost of wealth looms into view. The windows are tinted and the doors are always locked—to get in, you either know a code or someone famous. The parking lot gleams with Benzes, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, a luxury fleet under 24-hour guard. This is Miami’s Hit Factory—the recording studio where Justin Timberlake made his last album, where Shakira and Scott Storch regularly bump into each other in the halls and where Lil Wayne is camped out, hard at work, one hot June night.

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

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

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

Suddenly, he breaks into a tuneless croon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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and now some blender pictures for the wayne groupies