It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and though the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs are set to face off 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 off 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 flows 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 the 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’ offense 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 film 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 first 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 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.

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 five-year 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 to see who’s in the room, what they’re reacting to or what they’re not reacting to, and he takes that

into account in his performance.

“When you go see a Lil Jon show, he entertains,” Kundu continues. “And he’s very nice to everybody, from the busboys to the waiters to the managers to the sound guys. He’s hospitable, and he makes everyone have a good time.”

Lil Jon likes to kick off his club sets amid the crowd, “and I start with ‘Shots,’” Jon notes, “because people come in here to party. They gotta get their shots right away.” It’s also not unusual to see the DJ pouring the liquor himself as he parties on risers surrounded by clubgoers. He makes it a point to sneak all of the crunk standards in too—from “Get Low” to “Snap Yo Fingers”—because some fans aren’t as familiar with his revered DJ run.

“Most people are surprised at how good of a DJ I am,” he says, smiling. “I can play something for everybody, from Latin to hip-hop to house. Any kind of music. I can play it just as good as the top DJ in that genre.”

Jon began DJing in the early 1990s, well before he was a Grammy award-winning artist or the go-to producer behind some of Usher and Ciara’s biggest hits. Jon played clubs around Atlanta, meeting So So Def Recordings producer Jermaine Dupri along the way and joining him to recruit other rappers. When Lil Jon stepped out into the limelight with The East Side Boyz in the early 2000s, he did so as the face of Southern crunk.

“We’d just go into the studio and try to make good records,” he recalls. “The first song we recorded was a song called ‘Who U Wit,’ and that basically started us as crunk artists, because we didn’t rap on the song; we were just doing chants. From there we developed … into having ‘Bia Bia’ and ‘What U Gon’ Do.’ It was always rowdy club music, and then it got rowdier.

“But,” he quickly adds, “I also understood that you got to make records for the girls. That’s why we had ‘Get Low.’ That’s why we had ‘Lovers and Friends.’ It can’t just be rowdy all the time. You just gonna hang out with testosterone all day and night? No!”

Lil Jon pushed DJing to the side as he ascended his crunk throne. And then one night, at an afterparty in the late 2000s, the rapper discovered DJ Spider, whom he credits for getting got him back into his crate-digging craft. By then, he says, it was time.

“After the crunk era, I was fried from producing so much,” he explains. “Through DJing, I met [Steve] Aoki, and me and Aoki got together with Laidback Luke and we did ‘Turbulence.’ But before Aoki, I did ‘Shots’ with LMFAO, and I did ‘The Anthem’ with Pitbull. All of those records got me into the EDM world.

“Then I ended up meeting DJ Snake, and we did ‘Turn Down for What’ and that was the No. 1 EDM song of the year for 2014. All of this stuff is crazy, because the biggest record of my career was, ‘Yeah.’ Then 10 years later, I have ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s unheard to have a run this long.”

And Lil Jon has no plans to slow down. He’s revamping his Hakkasan club set, promising it will “change the game up a little bit and bring back some things that people don’t do anymore in the nightclub.” Pressed on the topic, he leans in to say, “The only thing I’ll give you is shhh, because the party’s so crazy, you can’t tell everybody what happened. It’s that wild.”

Considering everything we know about Lil Jon, we’ll take his word for it. After all, “If you want a party, I’m the guy known for shots and making the girls dance,” he says. “Who else would you want to come see but me?”

Lil Jon said what?! (outtakes from our convo)

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.

On his HGTV show, Lil Jon Wants to Do What? “Season 1 was like, get your foot in the door, get your bearings. Now we’re doing some crazy builds right now. We’re doing eight houses at the same time. We just finished our first one two weeks ago. They’re very creative. That’s one thing I pride myself on is being creative, me and my partner. We don’t want to give anybody white walls. And we feel like we have a different kind of energy for HGTV. And fun fact, we brought the youngest demographic to HGTV ever for our first season.”

On possibly moving to Las Vegas, permanently “[Steve] Aoki was pushing me on that years ago. He’s got this crazy freaking house with foam pits, and he’s jumping off the roof into the pool. He’s like, ‘You should move out here, man.’ I’ve thought about it a couple of times. But Vegas is the playground. You can’t lay your head where the playground is,” he says, laughing. “But maybe I’ll eventually get a house here. Who knows?”