Wiz Khalifa Gets Shaded by Interviewer

Wiz had a recent interview with GQ Magazine, and it’s pretty apparent the interviewer isn’t sold on his talent.

Throughout the write-up, the writer, Zach Baron, delivered plenty of shade and it’s not so subtle.

Here’s a few excerpts:

A thin lavender m*rijuana fog—like a sub-ocular purple, a slight distortion in the visual field—hangs lightly in front of the picture windows in Wiz Khalifa’s hotel suite. Wiz, just waking up as midnight comes on, materializes out of the fog, shirtless and barefoot, skinny and tall, vertical as an exclamation point. His frail torso seems borrowed from a Depression-era pneumonia victim. His dreads turn honey-colored right as they hit his face, like he’s a Tolkien character in whose footprints flowers grow. Ever literal, he has the words Wiz Khalifa tattooed on his right arm.

…At this point, Wiz is a hitmaker who can get away with skipping the actual work of making hits; the biggest song on Khalifa, “Bake Sale,” is a Travis Scott–assisted, shamelessly close remake of Scott’s own “Antidote.” But no matter. A huge number of people just like Wiz Khalifa, no matter what he does. It’s like God put him on earth to be a 19-year-old’s favorite rapper. He loves simple teenage things—drugs, new clothes, having fun with his friends—and expresses that love in a simple way. His embrace of cliché—of the exact rhyme or boast or ad-lib or reference to weed, d*ck game, etc., that you might predict was coming—is so total it resembles performance art. (My chain sh*t on your car / My Rolex f*cked your b*tch.) And yet he is beloved. Twenty-four million Twitter followers, a couple of gold records, a song (the Paul Walker–memorializing “See You Again”) that was inescapable last year, and a rabidly enthusiastic when not debilitatingly stoned fan base (“Taylors,” named after Wiz’s label, Taylor Gang) who will probably attempt to locate my phone number and home address after reading the above sentences.

…It’s ostensibly his job to make music and so he does, for brand-maintenance purposes, but it’s mostly his job to do what he’s doing now—to just sort of exist, in a cloud of weed smoke and benevolent debauchery.

…John places a shot of gin by Wiz’s elbow. Wiz tells me he hasn’t been sober since he traveled to Dubai, a couple of years ago.

Before that, who knows?

Do you remember what it was like, to be sober?

“Yeah, I remember what it was like. It sucked.”

After a while, he notices the shot of gin, throws it back. His girl is now watching herself smoke weed via the camera on her iPhone, breathing thick clouds of white toward the screen. Wiz is finally ready to go.