Lil Wayne Goes to Jail

Up all night with hip-hop's unstoppable machine as he prepares to spend the next year behind bars

By Chris Norris

February 3, 2010 12:00 AM ET

Photograph by Peter Yang

"I don't like to stop," says Lil Wayne. "I believe you stop when you die." The biggest rapper in the world stands 23 floors above Atlanta and five feet six in black Chuck Taylors, his wifebeater tee baring a torso as ink-covered as the pages of a doodler's notebook. It's 8:30 p.m., two days after Christmas, and he will be up for the next 11 hours — monitoring four football games, smoking blunts, six or seven of them, sending 40-odd texts (including condolences to his mom for today's loss by the New Orleans Saints), making calls and auditioning 600-odd bars of potential beats over six hours in a recording studio.

Life on Planet Wayne

Dwayne Carter, 27, has been on this schedule for close to a decade. But on February 9th, one week after he drops his rock-oriented seventh official studio album, Rebirth, he begins a 12-month sentence for gun possession, stemming from a 2007 charge. He's known plenty of people from his old neighborhood who have gone to jail, but he hasn't asked them for any advice on how to prepare. "This is not something you get no advice on," he says. "This is Lil Wayne going to jail. Nobody I can talk to can tell me what that's like. I just say I'm looking forward to it."

This article appeared in the February 18, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

Tonight, the rapper wears his long dreads tied back, along with bookish, black-framed glasses and Polo pajama pants. A small diamond cross hangs on a thin chain around his neck. "It's the only jewelry I wear every day," Wayne says in a deep rasp, then flashes a sleepy, diamond-encrusted smile. On a glass table before him are his iPhone, T-Mobile Sidekick, a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, a bag of Sour Patch candies, a bottle of iced tea and a roll of about three grand worth of hundreds — "just in case I need to send someone to the store."

Lil Wayne: A History in Photos

An enormous amount of man-hours goes into keeping Wayne happy and creative — to keep his torrential rhyme flow, which earns around $150,000 per guest appearance, coming. He's never far from a recording studio or a portable recording setup (even if it's just a professional mike and a laptop with GarageBand). Wayne's personal chef, Noel, stands at parade rest in a double-breasted black uniform and apron, ready to prepare steak or chicken in minutes. Somewhere within text-message summons awaits Wayne's personal driver, Mr. G., who wears a slate-gray chauffeur uniform, complete with cap. "It ain't no party," says E.I., Wayne's road manager, who lives with a T-Mobile dedicated to one caller. "You don't get no sleep. There ain't no such thing as 'off.'" E.I.'s main daily goal, he says, is to be awake before Lil Wayne. "Even if it's just 10 minutes."

Timeline: The Criminal History of Lil Wayne

A laptop displays Wayne's fantasy-football team, the South Beach Sloths (named while watching Animal Planet); the flat- screen TV in this room has the Eagles-Broncos game; the TV in the other room has Cowboys vs. Redskins. Wayne, an occasional blogger and on-air commentator for ESPN (whose logo he has tattooed on his leg), hates to miss a second of SportsCenter. A young woman in a sweatsuit quickly walks by carrying an infant in a car seat. "That was Neal," says Wayne, "the newest" — thus distinguishing the three-week-old son with singer Nivea Hamilton from the 15-week-old he just had with actress Lauren London — his third and fourth children, after Raginae, 12, and Dwayne III, 1, and more proof how little he fears flooding the market with material.

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