Then a convict, now a platinum singer, Lyfe Jennings reinvents himself yet again.
Phoenix, a precocious three-year-old, makes himself at home in my car’s backseat and happily chants along to rhymes not of the nursery variety. Birdman’s latest is playing on the local hip-hop station, Power 106 FM, and Phoenix tries to keep up, punctuating the end of each verse with baby-talk blurts of “pop bottles” and “pop models.” In phoenix’s lyrical remix, however, Baby and Lil Wayne are referencing “pop bubbles,” probably a much more appealing subject within his demographic. Then, Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” comes on. Naturally, Phoenix know this one, too.
But don’t fear-parental discretion is here. The tyke is bouncing on the lap of his doting father, singer-songwriter Lyfe Jennings.
“My boy sings everything he hears on the radio,” the father of two says a few hours later over dinner at the Hyatt West Hollywood’s plush restaraunt (his one-year-old son Elijah, is back home in Atlanta, presumable not rapping). “Some of the stuff I hear him singing, I’ll be like, ‘Nah, man, you don’t sing that.’ When I put a song on the radio, I think about how somebody else’s kids are gonna be singing that, and that makes me extra conscious of what music I put out.”
