Lil Wayne Blender Interview

DR. WEEZY....The biggest mouth in hip-hop loves Nirvana, loves codeine-spiked cough syrup even more—and has no idea what a koala is.


Hot Beats Recording Studios sits on the southwest side of Atlanta, tucked into a desolate stretch of road where every third streetlamp is burnt out. The building is stubby and drab: its facade gray concrete, its windows opaque. If it weren’t for the tour bus idling in the parking lot, the gaggle of luxury SUVs and the XXXL-size sentries keeping watch, you could mistake the place for an auto-parts wholesaler fallen into disuse. When Lil Wayne is in town, this is where he spends his evenings (and dead-of-nights, and early mornings). “They let me come in whenever,” he says. “And that works, ’cause I’m a man who doesn’t keep a regular schedule.”

These days, the New Orleans–born rapper, 25, splits his time between Atlanta, Miami and the road. He says he spends about 200 days a year on his tour bus. “I don’t have a home,” he notes. He’s wearing pristine high-tops, distressed designer jeans and a tight black T-shirt; and he’s clasping a Styrofoam cup full of promethazine-codeine cough syrup (one accessory­ he’s never without). “It’s supposed to make you sleepy,” he explains. “But I must have one badass immune system, because it just keeps me going. You’d think it was cocaine.”

The stuff works for him. Wayne has been known to record upward of a dozen songs in a single night, and his vast catalogue of straight-to-the-Net mix tapes—breathtaking, free-­associative dispatches from a dimension where the typical rules of hip-hop no longer apply—is evidence of his frenzied output. Tonight, though, he’s concentrating on the biggest release of his career—Tha Carter III—which will prove whether or not Wayne can translate the unhinged genius of his mix tapes into an actual, honest-to-God album.

Well, he’d like to be concentrating on the LP, but first there’s the matter of your questions. Is he ready for the third degree? “Let’s go, man,” he says, grinning. “I’ve had to deal with worse.”

FULL INTERVIEW