You've got two ways to witness this freestyle, at least until they get yoinked from YouTube again and then reposted in some new, further bastardized form. You can watch this this pilfered, triplehand account, a videotaped TV screen blurred and fuzzed inscrutably, or you can double the runtime with this, erm, screwed and chopped version. The advantage of the first of these is that the viewer gets to witness, in real time, the stratospheric rise and subsequent blinding dilation of Lil' Wayne's flow; the advantage of the second is that the viewer gets to watch Baby decline to touch the mic afterward, too stunned to front.

Somewhere in the grey area between viewings of these two compromised clips the viewer can piece together what a monstrous thing this is. When Nahright upped a clean, full rip a few weeks ago, the freestyle stood like one of those moments where if I heard some DJ yell "history in the making" I might buy in. Because even if this freestyle isn't quite ready for Wikipedia canonization -- that highest of honors -- it is an historic moment on a more personal timeline: it marks the moment I stopped worrying and bought into Lil' Wayne. It takes Weezy a few bars to catch the beat, and in the first half he nervously jumps through some scattered maritime punchlines, quick syllable play and frenzied linguistic backflips ("Money's the sail to my boat / It's going down, it's going down / Like there's a whale in the boat"). In the second half, his flow slows to a crawl and what emerges from the microphone is something like pure charisma. With every lift of his shades to reveal his rodent Smeagol mug Wayne inches closer to the filthy GOAT he aspires to be. "Flow sick, so sick, need a doc, yes / A creature, monster like the Loch Ness," he spits at one point, before quivering with Evangelistic fervor, "I hear the track, I'm like an energy pack / The instruments are crying out, 'Where the sympathy at?'" The freestyle disintegrates at that point into glowing embers of rhymed cackling, our faces as blank as Baby's.

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