Rock Star of the Year: Lil Wayne

Photograph by Tina Tyrell

And Tha Carter III is very good -- both audacious and accessible. His rhymes are sharp and woozy at the same time, and although Wayne's prodigal gift for language is often obscured behind sexual bravado and scatological silliness, it's enhanced by the dead-on emotion with which he invests his wheezes, mumbles, and howls. On "Playing With Fire," he sounds nervy and unstable delivering lines like "I feel caged in my mind, like my flow is doing time / I go crazy inside, but when it comes out, it's fine like wine," which incidentally is as useful an explanation as you'll ever get from him about his process.

In person, Wayne is a larger presence than his five-foot-six frame would suggest. Part of this can be attributed to the long dreads he usually pulls back in a rubber band, the shimmering grill that covers his teeth, and the tattoos that decorate nearly every visible inch of his body -- there's a lot to look at. But there's also the intensity he radiates, an uneasy calm that may be as much chemically enhanced as natural, which makes him unpredictable and therefore a magnet for attention. It's this intensity that has made nearly every one of the tracks he's put out in the past few years worth at least a listen.

"I truly believe he comes from the planet of Lil Wayne," says Wentz. "When we did the VMAs together, we did a remix of 'This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race,' and we did two run-throughs. Each time, his verse was completely different, both times off the top of his head. It just boggled my mind that someone could have that sense of verbiage."

But for Wayne, Tha Carter III was as much about harnessing his talents into something more marketable as it was about showing them off. "I knew this was the album that I wanted to get me recognized," he says. "I simplified a lot of my words, took a lot of slang out of my vocabulary, and took myself off a lot of the hooks. I used to do everything myself. That's the Cash Money way: You do your beat, your song, your hook, your promotion."

Lil Wayne has been steeped in the Cash Money way for more than half his life. Raised as the only child of a single mother in the Hollygrove section of New Orleans, he was 11 when he got Baby's attention by leaving rhymes on the label chief's answering machine. He dropped out of school at 14 and fathered his first child at 15, the same year he released his first album as one of the Hot Boys. By 17, his solo debut, Tha Block Is Hot, was platinum. Back then, he was a fairly ordinary MC rhyming over the workmanlike bounce provided mostly by Cash Money in-house producer Mannie Fresh. But over time, Wayne did something few child stars manage: He got better. Some like to attribute it to some sort of Faustian deal; the truth is a lot less interesting.

"When you're trying to be the best, your work ethic has to be the best," says Baby. "All we do is be in the studio. That's the difference between him and the rest."

Read the entire interview with Weezy in the January 2009 issue of SPIN, on newsstands now.