GONE ‘TIL NOVEMBER - LIL’ WAYNE

Few careers are as strange and interesting as Lil’ Wayne’s. Lil’ Wayne himself, judging from his lyrics, interviews and album titles ( ex. I AM NOT A HUMAN BEING), is, to say the least, strange and interesting. He has a career that rockets him from inner-city New Orleans to superstardom before he can legally drive. He’s gone through large dry spells and reemerged. His style of rapping completely changed rap; there is no post-Wayne rapper who isn’t Wayne’s child.  His relationship with Baby and Ca$h Money in general is fascinating and bizarre. His persona and lifestyle alone are book worthy. He seems like a sort of Tasmanian devil, running around the world, giving and receiving oral sex with abandon, drinking swimming pools of lean and smoking weed by the acre, covering himself with tattoos (he was an early face-tattoo pioneer), croaking through interviews and never, never, ceasing to record. Sadly, this book covers none of this. There is a brief intro at the beginning explaining that he’s releasing the book because he’s pissed at Ca$h Money and wants to connect with his fans. Sadly, this would have been the perfect opportunity to write a tell-all about his whole life. For it to be what I want it to be, he’ll need to be angry at Baby when he writes it.  He spends much of his time in jail reading SCAR TISSUE by Anthony Keidis and one can’t but wish he’d written a book in that vein. Where you just go from crazy story to crazy story. But whatever, you get what you get and someday someone will write a great Wayne bio. In the meantime, this suffers because jail is boring and repetitive. Most days Wayne eats junk food and makes phone calls. He’s in the protected custody wing of Rikers so there’s not much action. At one point a guy yells at Wayne and calls him a junkie and threatens to hurt him and he’s immediately transferred out of their unit. Wayne believes he gets special treatment since he has the ability to sue. He seems correct, at one point, when a guard finds an mp3 player the warden comes to talk to Wayne personally, which I have to imagine is unusual. Otherwise, we do get a dribble of weird Wayne info. Guards bring him homemade food, but Wayne tells us his mother told him to never eat another woman’s red gravy. We learn he hates Duke. A female fan who is a lawyer but not Wayne’s lawyer bluffs her way in to visit him.  It really fucks him up when he finds out a girl he’s slept with had slept with Drake in the past. I found this very strange. I must assume there is enormous overlap between Drake and Wayne’s partners. But Wayne mostly keeps to himself so not much happens. He works on suicide watch and witnesses a prison wedding. He uses the word “yeah” a lot. It’s annoying the book is formatted to look like a fake journal to the point where they use a faux-handwriting font that is silly and hard to read. But the book is short and I assume this was a way to pad it out. The book does not go far to answer one of the deepest questions of Wayne’s career thus far (Wayne is rap’s Bob Dylan, a conversation for another post, so I assume we’re going to get many eras and epochs): what did prison do to Wayne’s rapping. Before he went in, he truly was the best rapper alive. It was insane. He would drop top 5 mixtapes constantly. He was so much better than everyone and he was producing more than anyone else. After Carter III and jail, he hasn’t gotten that back. There’s nothing in this book that suggests why. Maybe it was a natural burnout from the drugs and lifestyle (this book does not address the withdrawls he must have felt in jail or tell us how he prepared so as to avoid them) maybe jail really did mess with his head. Maybe everyone else caught up while he was in there. Either way, we get no answers here. As alway, Abolish Prison. 2007 Rikers