GQ’s profile of Lil’ Wayne…
Posted: January 6, 2009 at 12:01
There are a couple of magazines that I try to read every month, chief among those being Esquire and GQ. I should point out that reading these magazines has done next to nothing to improve my sense of fashion, but they do have, to me at least, some of the best writing of the major monthlies.
So, this month’s GQ has Jennifer Aniston on the cover. Let me just say now that she’s never really done it for me, but damn. She’s obviously got some good people in place to get her career back on track.
Unfortunately, the cover article on her was pretty weak. I mean, it was written well enough and was at least interesting, but Entertainment Weekly ran almost an identical story on her a few weeks prior, and they both might as well have been directed by her publicity people.
However, buried in the back of the magazine is “Freak,” a great profile of Lil’ Wayne. I actually didn’t even realize that the article was in there, seeing as it starts on page 114 of a 128 page magazine, after roughly 30-40 pages of fashion shoots, and there’s no mention of it on the cover.
It was written by Devin Friedman, with photos by Terry Richardson (who was, coincidentally, the subject of one of GQ’s better pieces of last year) some cool pencil-styled graphics on the main spread. I’ll have some more thoughts/commentary after the jump.
Now, I really have no interest in Lil’ Wayne. I’m generally not a fan of rap, and I’m definitely not a fan of the auto-tune bandwagon that Wayne’s kind of a part of. All the same, I enjoyed the hell out of this piece. Two things in particular stood out for me:
1.) The article exists entirely in its own world. The piece is about the strange life of Wayne as much as it’s about Wayne himself, but there’s no judgment from Friedman about it. Everything is simply taken in stride and left to the reader. It would have been incredibly easy for him to laugh it off at Wayne’s expense. That he didn’t try to overwrite it is pretty admirable.
2.) It’s about the process as much as it’s about the subject. Part of the story is about how hard it is to get access to Wayne. This would usually result in an average write-around, where the lack of access is simply never mentioned, or where it’s the only thing that’s mentioned. Instead, Friedman uses it as a way to demonstrate yet another aspect of the Wayne’s little personal universe.
It’s not the best thing I’ve ever read, but it goes above and beyond what you’d expect for the piece. I think what I liked most was that it operated more like a snapshot or a documentary of this character in these moments than anything else. That’s one of the hardest things to do well, and pulls it off. I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you come across a copy of the magazine, since it’s not online for whatever reason.
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