Lil Wayne Goes to Jail : Rolling Stone

This story was originally published in February 2010. Since then, Lil Wayne's sentencing has been postponed two times. For the latest on his developing case, click here.

"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.

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