Everybody has asked the question for over 20 years: why does Lil Jon ALWAYS wear those sunglasses? Indoors, at night, on stage, on TV — the shades never come off. Most of us just figured it was part of the King of Crunk’s whole look. Turns out, it was never just a look. This week, Lil Jon finally told the truth — and the real story will stop you in your tracks.
In his new memoir, I Only Shout So You Can Hear Me — which hits shelves tomorrow, Tuesday, October 20 — the Atlanta legend opens up to PEOPLE about a freak childhood accident that changed his eyes, and his life, forever.
It started with his mother’s insulin needle. Jon grew up in Atlanta watching his mother, Carrie, who lived with diabetes, give herself insulin shots. When he was about 6 years old, curiosity got the best of the little boy. He picked up one of his mother’s syringes because he wanted to see what the air from it would feel like against his eye. Instead, he accidentally stabbed himself right in the eyeball.
Doctors told the family the needle had caused a traumatic cataract. What followed was years of treatment: multiple surgeries, including a corneal transplant, and little Jon had to go to school wearing a metal eye patch. And if you know kids, you already know what came next. “I definitely was teased in school,” Jon told PEOPLE. “At that age if somebody’s different, they’re going to pick on you. I became shy. But somehow I turned it into, ‘I want to always prove people wrong.’”
Right before the accident, Jon had started learning to play the drums — and music became the place where the shy kid with the eye patch could be somebody else entirely. As an adult, the childhood injury left him with a lazy eye. He had another surgery to correct it, but by then the sunglasses had become a part of him, and he kept wearing them. The rest of us just thought it was style. “Whenever people have put me down, I used that as fuel in my fire to excel,” he says. “I got to figure out how to pave my way no matter what. I got to prove people wrong. I’m the type, if an obstacle is put in front of me, I’m going to figure out how to go through it, over it, under it, around it.”
And here’s the part that brings the whole story full circle. Jon’s mother Carrie — the same mother in that syringe story — passed away in 2013 from complications of the same diabetes she fought his whole childhood. Look at what her son did with that pain. On Celebrity Apprentice All-Stars, he raised nearly $200,000 for the American Diabetes Association. Then he partnered with Pencils of Promise, put $70,000 of his own money in, traveled to Ghana with his family to physically help build TWO schools — and the very first school is named in his late mother’s honor. More than 550 children in Ghana are learning in classrooms Lil Jon built. “I’m all about helping children,” he has said. “Children are our future, and every child deserves to have an environment where they can learn and flourish.”
That’s why this memoir matters. The 304-page book, written with Paul Cantor and released through Charlamagne Tha God’s Black Privilege Publishing, is Jon telling his whole story in his own words — the Atlanta DJ years, the rise of crunk, the burnout, the meditation, and the pain underneath the party. He’ll be talking about it in person with Charlamagne at Barnes & Noble Union Square in New York on October 21, and at The Grove in Los Angeles on October 26.
So the next time you see Lil Jon behind those shades, know what’s really behind them: a little boy from Atlanta who got hurt, got teased, and turned all of it into fuel. YEAH!
FreddyO is working on a video about this story too — watch this space. Story via PEOPLE and TMZ.
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