At No. 1, Lil Wayne redefines stardom behind bars

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NEW YORK – He had the top-selling album in the country earlier this month. He's on the president's iPod. He's on the charts with two singles and a collaboration on a third. He's on Facebook with updates for the more than 14 million people following them. He is, in every respect, on.
By the way, Lil Wayne's in jail. But his public persona is anything but locked away.
The rapper, who's on track to be released Thursday after serving eight months in a gun case, is the first artist in 15 years to release a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart while serving a sentence. His "I Am Not a Human Being" spent a week in the top slot and has sold more than 323,000 copies since its Sept. 27 release, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
It's hardly a coveted distinction. But it is both a reflection of Lil Wayne's popularity — he went to jail a multiplatinum-selling Grammy Award winner — and a result of astute maneuvering in the multimedia landscape that now envelops pop stardom. Staying relevant? Try omnipresent.
"The challenge was to make sure you feel like he never left," says Bryan "Birdman" Williams, the Cash Money Records co-founder who has fostered Lil Wayne's career since the rapper's teens. "We came with a good strategy, and it worked."
Members of the rapper's management team carefully scheduled releases of music and saw to it that his responses to the deluge of fan mail that has descended on the city's Rikers Island jail complex were typed up and posted online. They have become regulars at Rikers' visiting hours and have played, and recorded, music over a jail phone.
The Lil Wayne campaign even comes with its own insider-y slogan — "free Weezy," one of his nicknames — circulated through channels ranging from T-shirts to a Twitter hashtag.
For the rapper, his jail term has been a difficult exile from the recording studio where he generally likes to spend time every night, his associates say. "When you take somebody's passion away, it's gotta be frustrating," Williams said in an interview.
But for his fans, it has provided not only a steady stream of new music, but an unusually direct connection to one of music's megastars. On a blog he set up for fans, he's offered insights into his day-to-day doings and responses to some of the listener letters that, he says, anchor his day.
"I never imagined that I could have such an impact on people's lives," he wrote in July on the site, Weezythanxyou.com.
Known for his workaholic output of witty, manifold and sometimes weird wordplay, Lil Wayne had the best-selling album of 2008 and won a best rap album Grammy with "Tha Carter III." Time magazine weighed him for its most-influential-people list last year; President Barack Obama recently told Rolling Stone he has some Lil Wayne music on his iPod.


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