I'm submitting THIS Jonah Weiner article on Lil' Wayne for Blender Mag to the Project For Excellence in Journalism. How he managed to continue the interview with a contact high is beyond my comprehension. This is one of the strangest things I've read, and trust me I see a lot of crack montser type shit.
The Mood Is Set
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!
On Childhood
Wayne has felt this sort of urgency since childhood. He grew up in Hollygrove, a working-class New Orleans neighborhood, and while other kids were playing with toys, he was writing raps and performing them on neighborhood porches. “I wasn’t ever no action-figure kid,” he says. “If I wanted to fight, I’d fight for real.” Wayne thanks his mother, Cita Carter, for this mentality. A tough-as-nails chef, she raised him by herself, teaching him early on how to act like a man. When he was in junior high, she gave him his first Glock, with instructions to empty it into the first guy that messed with him.
At 18, Wayne decided he wanted a teardrop tattoo, the first of four he wears today. These usually signify people you’ve killed, and although Wayne won’t explicitly explain their meaning, he habitually points to his tears when he’s threatening to destroy enemies. “I asked my mother permission to get it, and she respected my choice,” he recalls. “When I came home and showed it to her, she told me, ‘Boy, I might have to get one of those for myself!’”
I can't go on any further without feeling as though I'm letting down my entire race for even posting this. To read more click HERE!
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