Even to a public numb to the "rapper goes to prison" narrative, Lil Wayne's incarceration held particular intrigue. That was in part because of Wayne's staturehe's not just rapper, but one of the country's biggest pop stars, and it's rare to see any celebrity of such significance go to jailbut also because of how publicly his prison sentence played out. Following his guilty plea on gun charges in New York, magazines counted down to Wayne's incarceration with a bevy of pre-prison interviews and speculationwould he be allowed to keep his dreads?while the rapper himself updated fans through his Twitter account and, once in Rikers, his website WeezyThanxYou, where he posted monthly letters to his supporters detailing both life in the pen and his mind frame.
"Ain’t nothing going on in here but the time, which seems like it’s taking forever," he wrote in August. "I’m trying to make the most out of every second tho, mentally. There’s some pretty cool people in here. Even though this isn’t a cool place to be."
News reports further helped fans track Wayne's imprisonment in real time, telling of prison guards fired or reprimanded for getting too close to the rapper, and spreading false reports that the rapper had taken a job as a prison suicide-prevention aide.
Like any good drama, Wayne's eight-month incarceration ended with a climactic tribulation: a month of punitive segregation (solitary confinement!), punishment for his all-too-poetic infraction of hiding a forbidden MP3 player in his cell. "I can no longer write my fans, as difficult as this maybe to say please stop sending me mail," Wayne wrote in an unusually dispirited tweet before his isolation, "I luv u and will see you soon." Without Wayne's updates, fans were left alone with their imaginations to picture the travails Weezy faced in solitude.
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By that point, even Bill Clinton was pulling for him.
This morning, amid considerable news coverage, Wayne left prison as he went in, with the number one rap album in the country. In March, that album was Rebirth, his critically maligned but respectable-selling rap-rock crossover album. Today it's I Am Not a Human Being, an enjoyable if slightly stale assemblage of Wayne's pre-prison recordings (its single, "Right Above It," is currently perched on top of the Billboard rap charts).
What's next for Wayne? First, a party on Sunday. Then, presumably, he'll set about the task of recording Tha Carter IV, his highly anticipated sequel to Tha Carter III, the best-selling album of 2008. Banked good will gave Wayne a pass on Rebirth and I Am Not a Human Being, but fans won't be so forgiving if the next Carter album disappoints. For his part, Wayne has invited high expectations, and has suggested through his letters to fans that jail time has only enhanced his creativity.
"I will be the same Martian I was when I left," he promised, "just better."
