LIL Wayne Is The Blackest Man On The Planet - NO. 1 Even While Behind Bars - Memetic Genius

(AP) 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.