In Kailua, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, there’s a lavish estate at the end of a long and winding driveway so steep you have to lean forward to walk it. The view of the ocean is nearly breathtaking, and the house is beautifully modern, with five bedrooms, fold-back glass walls, and an asking price of $15 million. It's early January, and fast-rising rap superstar Lil Uzi Vert, along with a dozen or more friends and associates, has just arrived here for a month-long stay. The first gate, the one that grants access to the neighborhood, can be opened with a key code. The second, the one that grants access to the property, must be opened remotely by someone who’s already inside.

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One of Uzi’s managers, a man in an oversized Allen Iverson jersey named Leighton “Lake” Morrison, lets me in. Not long after, I speak with Uzi briefly on the house’s roof deck, while this story’s photographer, who is 6’2”, squats down for a better angle on Uzi’s 5’5” frame. “I hate photo shoots,” Uzi says unprompted, a claim he has made in some fashion in nearly all of the major interviews he’s done. I offer that it’s hard to tell, judging by the quality of the posts on his Instagram account, and he seems to soften with the compliment. “Instagram did just as much for me as SoundCloud,” he says. We’d been introduced an hour earlier, the rapper gifting me a limp and somewhat business-like handshake before moving toward a thermostat-sized touchscreen on the wall to cue up “200,000,” a recent loosie from Atlanta-based producer Wheezy that features Uzi, Shad Da God, and 2016’s other most celebrated feature artist, Quavo of Migos.

Uzi is technically the odd man out in that line-up — coming from North Philadelphia’s Francisville neighborhood, he’s the only one not from Atlanta — but he couldn’t sound more at home over Wheezy’s operatic piano riffs and speaker-stretching 808 rumble. The appeal of his style, not unlike a teenaged Lil Wayne, is some combination of nasal vocal tone and penchant for melody, despite no discernible singing talent. He weaves in and out of the pocket, stuffing an inordinate amount of syllables into a bar without sounding like he’s trying to make a name for himself in a cypher, a particularly interesting skill considering his city’s long-held reputation for shotgun-mouthed, battle-ready MCs. Uzi’s nonconformity was enough to convince DJ Drama and storied producer Don Cannon, likewise Philly natives who’ve made their names trading in southern soundscapes, to sign him in 2014 to their Generation Now imprint, which is distributed by Atlantic. “He is to Philly what A$AP Rocky is to New York,” Drama says. “He can swag it out with cats that from the A, or wherever.”