VEGAS’BIGGEST FANSPORTS

How mega DJ and music icon Lil Jon fell in love with Las Vegas and its teams t’s Super Bowl Sunday, and though the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs are set to face o for the Vince Lombardi trophy this afternoon in Arizona, Lil Jon has touched down in Las Vegas, staunchly decorated like a Raider.

Behind his signature shades, the megastar shows o his obsidian black sneakers, tailor-made and terrifying with their large, protruding spikes—a near match to the ones adorned by Raider Nation’s most notoriously committed fans. The multiplatinum crunk king, who introduced himself simply as “Jon,” knows the NFL’s fan base well, and the love ows in both directions.

“A testament to that is when I did the Raiders halftime performance last year. We had the No. 1 rated halftime performance in all of the NFL, of all of the teams’ performances,” says Jon, who has parked himself on a couch inside Weekly’s photo studio for our chat. His shades shield his eyes— even indoors—but his tone is anything but guarded. It’s proud.

“Whenever I go to a Raiders game, or just games in general, they’ll show the clips of that performance, because it was just so good,” he says. “They play my songs at all of them. You can’t go to a sporting event in America without hearing two or three songs with my voice.”

It’s no exaggeration. Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” exploded onto the club scene like a viral party grenade in 2013. But no one could have anticipated that its passage into the sports world would reshape it into an inescapable arena anthem. That much could also be said about the 52-year-old rapper, who in recent years has become an iconic part of sports fandom—especially here in Las Vegas, where he holds down a Tao Group club residency roughly three times a month.

Some nights, the Atlanta-born DJ, songwriter and producer can be found on the sidelines of Vegas Golden Knights games, pumping up the crowd at T-Mobile Arena and serving as the rowdiest of good luck charms for the team. He even rang the opening siren for Game 1 of the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals. VGK defenseman Brayden McNabb respects Jon’s enthusiasm.

“I’ve met him a couple times— he seemed like a big Knights fan,” McNabb says. “You love the support, no matter who it is. You get the high-level celebrities who like to come out to the game, and it’s awesome. It’s great for us, great for the team, and it’s fun having them behind us.”

On other nights, Jon’s rocking an A’ja Wilson tank at Las Vegas Aces games or a UNLV Runnin Rebels’ jersey when he isn’t DJing—or coaching the Golden Knights’ o ense about his time-tested “Shots” strategy, as seen in a viral November commercial that featured a handful of players, including McNabb.

“I haven’t been embraced by a team like that ever,” Jon says of the Golden Knights. “They even called me for the documentary.”

The 2019 lm Valiant chronicles the team’s inaugural-season run to the Stanley Cup Finals in the aftermath of one the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. And, Jon says, the community’s response to that October 1 tragedy played a major part in him adopting Las Vegas as his sports town of choice.

“I was here when the tragedy happened, and the one good thing that came out of that was the city came together,” he says. “That’s part of why I support all of the teams, because we support each other. And that’s what Vegas is about. The slogan is Vegas Strong—we’re all together. So anything Vegas I’m gonna support, win or lose, because this is my second home. Everybody in this city is basically like my family.”

Jon’s support for the Knights dates back even further, “before it was all the way a team,” he says.

After the NHL awarded Las Vegas its rst major professional sports franchise in 2016, the earliest version of the Knights’ team shop offered but one jersey. Still, Jon made it a point to get rinkside as soon as the doors opened. As a longtime hockey fan, how could he not?

“When I was younger in Atlanta, we had the Flames, then we had the Thrashers,” he says. “And I actually got back into hockey taking my son to games to show him how the pros did it, because he was playing hockey at the time when we had the Thrashers.”

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman reached out to Jon not long after that. “They saw my interest

(Continued on Page 20) in the sport and, me being a Black man in hip-hop, that was a rarity,” he explains. “The owners of the team at the time would give me amazing seats on the glass, and I fell in love.”

The Atlanta Thrashers capped their final season in 2011 before relocating to Winnipeg. Jon wouldn’t feel that same swell of pride for an NHL team for years, not until Las Vegas passed the puck to the Knights, one of the most exciting debuts in hockey history.

“That first season was just amazing,” he says somewhat wistfully. “To go to all of those games and then to have the amazing opportunity to open up the Stanley Cup, performing? Before that, hip-hop didn’t do Stanley Cup.

“What was amazing about that cup also was we got to show the world how Vegas does it,” he continues, leaning forward as though charged by the memory. “People were like, ‘Whoa, Vegas does it different. Vegas got the best arena and fans in the league!’ I remember before the team came, they were giving us a hard time, like, ‘Vegas isn’t a sports town. Vegas don’t have no real hockey fans.’ Vegas showed that we do have real fans.”

The Las Vegas Aces’ 2022 WNBA championship only reinforced that reality. Jon began following that team after performing at one of its halftime shows during the playoffs. “I went to the game, and I fell in love with women’s basketball,” he says, despite never attending a game prior to that.

To see them “kill it and bring the first major championship for a professional team to the city?” Well, it did a little something for this Las Vegas sports fan’s confidence.

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The dressing room inside the Weekly’s photo studio is full of Lil Jon’s sports swag.

He insisted on bringing his own pieces to the photo shoot—and his own form of ice. The rapper’s bodyguard, a massive brick of a man, hands him a thick, 18-carat gold diamond-cut chain with a pendant spelling out “Las Vegas.” It gleams with a brilliance only his diamond-encrusted grill can match.

For a celebrity who owns bling that could probably double as a house down payment, Lil Jon seems surprisingly humble. That energy feels palpable in his physical presence, too. He’s temperate as he takes time behind the camera, looking through his photographs with an unhurried appreciation culminated by an occasional, “That’s dope.” It’s quite a contrast to the person he turns into with the camera aimed his way. That is Lil Jon, the party monster.

Flash. He bares his teeth, frozen in a muted roar.

Flash. He bites down squarely on his chain.

Flash. “I’m coming out of this sh*t,” he mumbles, bunching up the fabric of his Marshawn Lynch tee to land the perfect angle.

Where he finds the energy to put on a private show like this is a mystery. The night before Super Bowl Sunday, he hopped behind the decks at Hakkasan Nightclub, spinning into the wee hours of the morning. Earlier that day, he partied it up with football champ Rob Gronkowski in Scottsdale, Arizona, for his annual Gronk Beach Big Game bash. After this, he’ll pop back onto a plane for LA. If he’s winded by his schedule, you’d never sense it.

That unstoppable vitality has helped make Lil Jon as successful as he is. Everyone loves a life of the party, and in that department, few can match the man with one of the longest nightclub residencies on the Strip.

The hitmaker headlined a fiveyear engagement at Wynn’s Surrender Nightclub before kicking off his About Last Night residency at Hakkasan in 2016, making him an in-demand mainstay. Jon’s relationship with Tao Group dates back to the early 2000s, when the star frequented Tao’s New York clubs and hung with founders Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg in Vegas. His longevity with the megabrand is a testament to his talent. To stay relevant in these clubs, one can’t simply rely on celebrity.

“This is one of the most unique places to DJ in the world. You can’t come in here just expecting that you’re gonna kill it without doing your research,” he says. “People are from all over the world, all over the country, and you can’t play that stuff that might be the jam in your city. It takes a certain amount of skill to DJ in a Vegas club and to be able to rock a Vegas club.”

Jon says he learned a lot by studying open-format DJ Vice, who he’d come to see at Tao when he first started visiting Vegas. A lot of it is “testing out certain records,” he says, “and making your own special versions of records.”

Sujit Kundu, the founder of SKAM Artist booking agency, which represents Lil Jon, has seen a lot of “phoned in” performances. He says Lil Jon’s have never been among them.

“He pays attention to the crowd. He comes for every show one hour early, and he studies the audience,” Kundu says. “He’s looking

On turning down for … sleep? “I’m very into binaural beats. I do a lot of rain. I do a lot of ocean. I do frequencies. I’m very much into health and wellness, because I want to be here a long time, and your body is your temple. I have coming out later this year guided meditations and sleep meditation, because when you turn up, you gotta turn down sometime.” He explains further. “We took some of my biggest productions and made them into meditation sounding music. ‘Get Low’ is about grounding. We have ‘Say Yeah! to Life.’ We did a whole album of all of my songs and just made the music more spa meditation sound, and I did the guided meditations on those.