When reporting yesterday that Lil Wayne’s jail sentence will be pushed back until March 2 owing to dental-health issues, we mentioned he had spent Super Bowl weekend filming ten music videos. Now MTV has more details on the hardest working man in showbiz’s last few days. Turns out, it was only a measly nine, but sounds exhausting nonetheless: shooting went from 9 a.m. Friday to 8 a.m. Sunday, with bits of clips shot for several We Are Young Money tracks, Rebirth’s “Da Da Da,†“Knockout,†and “Get a Life,†and one top-secret Carter IV song. Most of the footage was recorded at a Miami studio in front of a green screen, so that Wayne’s parts can be grafted onto whatever the hell director David Rousseau decides to do with them later. As Rousseau put it, “At the end of the day, what it comes down to is making sure you got Wayne in the can.â€
This is all part of Cash Money’s plan to keep Wayne as ubiquitous in jail as he was out of it. Rolling Stone reports the label is moving its operations to New York during Wayne’s sentence, and that Wayne’s manager Cortez Bryant is looking into “Jailhouse Twitter accounts, TV shows, clothing lines, creative commercial tie-ins, endorsements and any other means possible to hang on to Wayne’s audience.†We definitely appreciate the efforts of Cash Money to keep Wayne in our lives — he’s been a daily presence roughly since 2005’s Tha Carter II, and to have him disappear suddenly would be jarring and disheartening. One thing Cash Money can’t get around, though, is that we won’t be getting new music until Wayne is out of prison, even though the back-to-rapping Carter IV is done right now (the plan is to release it as soon Wayne gets out). But can they really keep it from leaking for a whole year (or eight to ten months for good behavior)? We certainly hope not!