Miami's a party town by nature: this much is no mystery. Sometimes, though, nature makes its feelings known about such things. And on this particular weekend, forces both natural and manmade have conspired to make things more chaotic than usual. Hurricane Katrina has come and gone, and now a more metaphorical storm is making landfall in the form of MTV's Video Music Awards. It's a weekend of manic energy, high-posting and high-drama. The kind of weekend during which an eagle-eyed pedestrian might see The Game eating outside in South Beach, then turn the corner and see Sleepy Brown standing shirtless outside a Walgreen's. The kind of weekend when a Kanye West party at the Shore Club empties in a stampede after Suge Knight gets shot in the leg.

But just because Miami is poppin', doesn't mean the rest of Florida has been forgotten. Places like Orlando need love too--and as someone from Orlando once told Li'l Wayne, visiting from his own native New Orleans, "Next to Mickey Mouse, you the biggest thing here." So Friday night might have been a Diddy party at the South Beach club Mansion, and Sunday night might be the VMA show, to which Wayne will accompany a certain Baddest Bitch (more on that later), but in between comes Saturday night. Which is exactly when, and exactly why, the man born D'Wayne Carter, a.k.a. Lil' Wayne, a.k.a. Weezy F. Baby, is on a tour bus, dipped head to toe in Bathing Ape, heading north from Miami to bring O-Town some heat.

Not that the heat is reserved exclusively for his live show. An hour or so into the trip, Wayne remembers a long-standing grievance with the very magazine whose representative is sitting on the bus with him. Luke-warm album reviews and what his manager feels was a biased account of a Cash Money concert in New York have him a little salty. "I don't fuck with XXL," he says, growing surly. "I just remembered that. Fuck XXL! Straight up. And you can put that in there."

When his manager tries to massage the situation, Wayne explodes: "I'm from the hood! If they say fuck me, forever it's fuck you. You're workin' with a gangsta now! Matter fact, a nigga might wanna get off this bus right now." Meaning, of course, your friendly XXL correspondent. A moving tour bus isn't the most comfortable place to be when tempers get to flaring. Specially when they're flaring in your direction. Wayne calms down soon enough, though, and the interview proceeds.

You'll have to forgive Wayne if he's a little on edge. For all the national attention focused on the South over the years, it's often managed to miss him. At the tender age of 23, he can boast ten years and four albums worth of experience--he went platinum when he was just 16 with The Block is Hot--but people outside the region have habitually shoved him to back-burner status. Even when he released the seasoned and assured Tha Carter last year, he was accused of jocking Jay-Z from flow to surname.

Finally, a year and a half later, the tide is turning. First, the slow-burning Carter woke heads up, and a single, "Go DJ" proved to be his Wayne's biggest solo song to date. Then he dropped the scene-stealing verse on Destiny's Child's "Soldier" remix, and Jigga himself nearly stole him away Cash Money Records. Now, back safe and sound at the label that made him (holding the title of president, no less) and with The Carter 2 set to drop in late November, and Trina on his arm, Wayne's primed to take his down-south party countrywide.

* * *

While Lil' Wayne's star first rose back in the late '90s, during Cash Money's halcyon days, with BG and the Hot Boys and cuts like "Bling Bling" and "Project Bitch," the wave that's cresting right now began with the success of "Go DJ." The song's impact could be attributed to a few things: Mannie Fresh's menacing, minimalist track, Wayne's disjointed braggadocio, the fact that his voice has developed a croak that adds old-soul heft to his trademark, smart-ass, flyer-than-you flow: "And I move like the coupe through traffic/rush-hour, GT Bent', roof is absent/yo' bitch present with the music blastin'/and she keep askin', 'How it shoot if it's plastic?'"

As with any big single, though, much of its staying power is due to a simple and addictive chorus. The hook comes from a line of a 1993 Cash Money song, UNLV's "Don't U Be Greedy;" a fact that might have been lost on most people outside New Orleans, but UNLV was well aware of it. In fact, the group, long since departed from the label they helped put on the New Orleans map, had recently put out their own song with the same chorus, also called "Go DJ." They claimed Wayne and Mannie Fresh had jacked their concept wholesale. "They put out a song dissin' me because of that," Wayne says. "But that's a Cash Money song, brother. I'm the president. I can do what I want."

That he would tap a vintage Cash Money tune for inspiration should come as no surprise; the company's history is intertwined with his own. He grew up in the same neighborhood as one of the original Cash Money rappers, Li'l Slim, and started listening to the label's music when he was all of eight years old. "Back then, I wasn't fuckin' with Jay-Z or Biggie or nothin' like that," Wayne remembers. "You couldn't bring that other music to New Orleans. It was Cash Money or nothin'." When he started writing rhymes as a kid, a rapper named Pimp Daddy was hitting in the streets with a song called "You Gotta Be Real." Young D'Wayne took to calling himself Shrimp Daddy--"I was short, real short"--and rewrote the lyrics to create "You Gotta Be Lil'." "I had me a hit with that one," he says now, laughing. "On the schoolyard."

When he was 11, D'Wayne stopped by a Cash Money in-store appearance, where Li'l Slim introduced him to Baby and Slim Williams, the brothers who had started Cash Money Records a couple years earlier, in 1991. "I did a rap where I spelled out my hood, Hollygrove," says Wayne, "and they gave me a card. You know, you give a child a card, he ain't never stop callin' that number." So he would call the pager number incessantly, Baby would invite him to the Cash Money offices, and Wayne's mother would drive him over like it was after school football practice. "I wouldn't do nothin' sittin' there all day," says Wayne, "but some days they'd be like, 'Let's take a ride.' All that escalated into me being part of the clique."

Soon, Wayne was recording as half of the B.G.'z (Baby Gangstaz), a group consisting of him as "Baby D," and another young Cash Money rapper named Doogie, or "Gangsta D." But when Wayne's grades started slipping, his mother pulled him out of the group. (She was well aware of the Williams bros.' street rep.) When the B.G.'z album, Tru Story, was released, Wayne only appeared on three tracks, and everyone assumed that "B.G." was Doogie's name. It stuck, as it turned out, and Wayne had to find a new name. Thus was born Lil' Wayne as we know him today.

Two years later, Wayne's stepfather, Reginald "Rabbit" Carter was abducted and murdered, and Baby stepped in to act as a surrogate. If Wayne and Cash Money hadn't been family by then, they were now, legal papers signed and all. After that, the fairytale story unrolled with a quickness. Juvenile came around, and Turk, and the Hot Boys formed. The label signed its historic $30 million deal with Universal in 1997, and the parade of hits started. With Mannie Fresh's patented electrofunk and their distinctive Nawlins slang, the crew sold more than 10 million records from 1998 to 2000. The Cash Money, ahem, Millionaires became the biggest thing in rap.

Eventually, though, as it always does, the bloom came off the rose. Juvie left the label in over financial disagreements, and Turk and B.G. soon followed suit. Record sales began to fall off. Wayne's second and third albums, Lights Out and 500 Degrees, only reached gold status--still impressive, but disappointing in comparison to earlier Cash Money releases. The empire, it seemed, was fizzling, and Wayne, as the sole full-time rapper, was looking like the last man standing on a sinking ship.

Last year, after Tha Carter dropped, things changed. Throughout Wayne's career, he'd been a kid rhyming about grown-man things; Tha Carter was his coming of age. "When I put out 500 Degrees," Wayne says, "people looked at me like, 'He's rebellious,' like it was my wild album. But Tha Carter was when they was like, 'Whoa.'" Songs like "I Miss My Dogs," an elegiac letter to his departed Hot Boys, revealed an emotionally mature Lil' Wayne--and stoked rumors of a group reunion. Wayne is quick to squash that idea, though: "That was the first time I looked at it, and the last. I closed that book. I was just bein' me; it was how I was feelin' that night in the studio."

On its way to selling 850,000 copies (a 350,000 uptick from 500 Degreez) the album sparked other controversies as well. On the track "Bring It Back," Wayne boasted of being the "best rapper alive since the best rapper retired." That, coupled with the album's coincidental use of Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter's last name (the title actually refers to the building Nino Brown comandeered for crack HQ in New Jack City, led to accusations of style biting. Jay didn't seem to have any problems with Tha Carter himself, personally recruiting Wayne to rhyme on the remix of Destiny's Child's "Soldier." Not surprisingly, the rumors started to fly. Li'l Wayne went right along with it, acknowledging that he was in talks with Rocafella/Def Jam, considering his options.

In the end, it was long-term thinking that landed him back at Cash Money with Baby, the man he calls Daddy. "Even though I had millions," he says of the Roc-A-Fella offer. "That didn't mean, 'We about to take care of you for the rest of your life. I had to make a smart move and think about my future." Baby and Slim gave him a deal to start his own imprint, Young Money Entertainment, and made him president of Cash Money to boot.

"We call it three heads," says Wayne, of his new role as an executive. "It's me Baby and Slim, and we meet every week to talk about whatever's goin' on." On top of that, and working on the follow-up to Tha Carter, Wayne has been keeping busy with outside projects. He entered the University of Houston earlier this year as a part-time student, and just began his second semester with psychology and English classes. He ghostwrote some rap ditties for Diddy, released a hugely popular Gangsta Grills mixtape with DJ Drama, and has stayed recording a seemingly unending string of feature verses for other artists. Many of them haven't even come out yet, but soon enough he'll be heard alongside Paul Wall, Chamillionaire, and pretty much any other southern rapper worth his lyrical salt. "I don't even have to drop my album," Wayne says, with a chuckle. "I really don't. Somebody just told me, 'I heard y'all took over BET--nigga, you on that mug all day."

One of those features, of course, was "Don't Trip" with Trina, a song that got a lot of heads wondering exactly what was going on between the two. An official statement on the matter showed up on Wayne's bus just before it left Miami. Who should come walking on board but Miss Glamorest Life herself, looking straight chastened when she notices a stranger sitting there with a notebook. Wayne's manager hooked them up a few months ago, and they've been spending time together since. Later, once Trina goes home and the bus is en route, Wayne opens up about their relationshipÉ kind of. "We was like big sister and little brother at first," he says. "We had never really kicked it, though, we was always like hi-and-bye. All it took was one sitdown with her, and, you know..." He smiles.

Diplomacy can only take you so far when there's a child in the room, though. Later in the ride, Wayne's seven-year-old daughter, Reginae, asks him point-blank, "Where's your boo?"

"At home," says Dad.

"Where, at her house?"

"Yeah, at her house. My house. It's all the same house."

* * *

Tha Carter 2 is done, if in slightly revised form than in the beginning. See, after Wayne re-upped with Cash Money and began working on the album, Mannie Fresh seemingly took the title "Go DJ" as a directive. The news of his departure filtered out in early August, but he'd actually left the camp a couple of months before that. All Mannie beats were taken off Tha Carter 2. As Wayne says, there were some "discrepancies." Like the time he went to Houston to rhyme on a track Chamillioinaire was working with and thought, "Man, this motherfucker sound familiar." Turns out it was a Mannie Fresh beat that Wayne had already recorded over for his own album.

There's no bad blood. "I holler at him, he holler at me," he says of Mannie--but Wayne has clearly taken the exit as disloyalty. "As long as I'm gonna be down with anything, I'll be a 150 million percent down with it," he says. "Meanin', I'm ready to ride and die for it, and fuck the other side. Right now and forever, I'm Cash Money. So whoever leaves, for whatever reason, I ain't even tryin' to understand it. I just stepped into the president position, so he left my business, you know what I'm sayin'?"

As for the album, it's a continuation of Tha Carter's ethos: I'm a grown-ass man, let me tell you about it. When the bus finally gets to Orlando, Wayne plays a few selections in his hotel room. The first single, "The Fireman," is a siren-filled call to arms. "You can spark it up," he chants, "and I'ma put you out." Birdman Baby shows up on "D-Boy," a track that flips the beat from Rakim's classic "Paid In Full," while Jody Breez and Kurupt make appearances on other songs. Produced by soundsmith Develop, "Weezy Baby" is the certified club banger--in fact, it was the song Wayne had in mind as the lead single, before Slim and Baby exercised veto power.

Sometime after one o'clock in the morning, the show promoter calls, and it's back on the bus. Club Firestone is ready. It might be 2:15 a.m., but when Wayne jumps onstage, the packed house roars, and the walls seem to bow outward from the noise. Wayne runs through his string of hits, from "Project Bitch" to "I Miss My Dogs," the crowd fervently yelling along to every word whenever he holds his mic out. When he strips down to his wifebeater, the females grouped up at the front of the stage scream; when that comes off as well, they scream even louder. Silhouetted against the house lights, standing there with his head back, dreads brushing his shoulders, he's nothing so much as a young lion, basking in the love of his adoring South. Ladies and gentlemen, Weezy Fuckin' Baby is in the building. And please say the Baby.