WEEZY GQ INTERVIEW

From the outside, it seems like you’ve had a pretty incredible year this year. Kind of a breakthrough year. Does it feel that way to you?
Of course it was the biggest year of my life. Obviously. The VMAs were the biggest moment. That was the craziest, because I didn’t expect to do none of those things. Didn’t even contemplate once taking an award home. That was just over the mountain.

The payoff was sweet, of course, but the whole year has been mostly consumed with hard work. Everything that everyone see and notice, those things happen one day, one week, those things happen whenever. But I work every single day. I work every single hour. That’s what my year has been like. Work.

What about your album?
That was good. But there’s more to be done. People got to understand there’s no peak on record selling, there’s no limit, so you never reach your goal, you’re never satisfied.

And I expected to sell that much. Because I worked that goddamn hard. And it sounded that goddamn good. And that much better than everyone else’s.

So one of those working days, what’s it like? Your typical day.
A typical day for me? (To his road manager) Can I have a lighter? (Lights a blunt.) I get up, and if I’m not on the road or doing something like a photo shoot, I’m in the studio. I get up and eat breakfast, I have a great chef. The homies usually come over. We eat breakfast and shit.

My chef makes the same thing every day, just the full breakfast, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes, sometimes waffles, fruit. Make sure that there’s everything you’re supposed to get.

You ever think about what happens when your record doesn’t open on top? Like where do you think you’ll be in ten years?
Nowhere. I don’t. That’s stupid. If anyone sees themselves in ten years they’re lying to themselves first, so you know they’re lying to you.

[A Lakers highlight comes on the flat-screen in the kitchen of his bus] Lakers my team. Cuz they got this creature on their team that’s unexplainably great, by name of Kobe Bryant. That’s just, just unreal. Until they don’t have him, I don’t understand why anyone else even play basketball.

[Then a LeBron highlight comes on the television] LeBron’s great, he gonna be better, because he’s younger, of course. That’s not even talent with LeBron, that’s magic. He may as well go on and tell everyone that he 35 years old, get it over with. He plays like a total man. He ain’t from Akron, he from Jupiter somewhere. Playing like that.

Speaking of Jupiter, you say on your records that you’re a Martian. What’s that mean?
Just out there, you know. Don’t like to think like everybody else, don’t like to try to think like everybody else, don’t like to do nothing everybody else think I’m gone do, don’t like to say nothing everybody else think I’m gone say.

I’m a Martian. I like to be different. And what’s more different than a Martian.

Seems at some point artists have to make the decision about whether they should be different or popular.
Not at all. It’s easy to be me.

That’s your first tattoo, right there, right?
My first tattoo is this tattoo right here, in memory of rabbit, it’s up to me. That’s my dad. He passed when I was 14, so I got it when I was 14.

How’d he die?
He got shot.

What were the circumstances of shooting?
Circumstances? Oh, right. None of nobody else’s business.

How did that affect you, you think?
I’m human. Affected me like it would affect anybody else I would imagine.

For the rest of the interview, go to http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/gqeditors/2009/01/lil-wayne-the-u.html