“I know the game is crazy, it’s more crazy than it’s ever been. I’m married to that crazy bitch, call me Kevin Federline.” -Lil Wayne, “I’m Me”

My favorite song on Tha Carter III is “Mr. Carter”—featuring Jay-Z, making good on the fact that both rappers share the same name—because it has Jay finally accepting his status as the hip hop King Lear and handing the torch over to Wayne. Validating, I would think, for a kid who spent all of last year running victory laps in honor of the title he’d awarded himself on the intro of his last mixtape. “I can jump on any nigga’s song and make a part two,” which turns out was the most germane way to become the best rapper alive.

The accuracy of this claim accentuates the fundamental difference between hip hop and rock music, conceptually as well as thematically. Rock music is insular. To the extent that competition exists between, let’s say, Wolf Parade and the Hold Steady, it is intangible to the public audience. In reality, Wolf Parade and the Hold Steady probably see each other as peers, in the general sense that they both are contemporary career bands catering to individually specialized audiences. This has to do with the marginalization of the rock scene, but even as popular music rock and roll has always employed a “live and let live” mindset. As a career, it sparked competition, but it was competition that extorted great personal effort and produced greater personal gain. Beatles-Wilson-Beatles, or whatever.

The competition in hip hop is more dangerous, because hip hop is grounded in more nihilistic pragmatism than the expanded consciousness of Summer of Love. Not that it was designed to be; ideally it would expand consciousness in a practical sense—as a movement in the ’70s it was designed in the spirit of spontaneity, as an affirmative act of positivity—and serve as momentary liberation to defy the slavery of slum stasis.

Thus hip hop fixated on groove; created in the limitless immediacy that is conjured out of active spontaneity, it utilized the kind of music that has no end and no borders. But momentary escapism wasn’t enough to solve the problems attached to ghetto life. Unlike the world according to the psychedelic revolution, ghetto life involved problems like getting shot and not having food.

If hip hop was going to incite change it would have to signify something equally concrete. Thus the lofty details of positive music were slowly discarded in favor of the nihilism of gangsta rap, which forwent an agenda and reveled in the power it created throwing the horror it lived with back into the public’s face. The generation that spawned it declared it a vicious danger, but it was devoured by the pop audience, which in turn agreed to provide a ticket out of the ghetto for anyone willing to bank on that horror.

But while the power gangsta rap was capable of conjuring could ideally propel positive change on a brand new mass scale, it looked exactly the same as the perversion that begot the Get In, Get Rich, Get Out strategy. In fact, that was the mindset; gangsta rappers treated hip hop like a business as a way to perpetuate their surrounding nihilism. Ghetto life required callous murder to get by, and getting out required selling records.

Both topics were treated as equal priorities, and as soon as people began forgiving these rappers for, we assume, killing people, they too began forgiving them for perverting the power of their music. The problem was that it sold. Raw ugliness became pop meaninglessness, and the message became freedom through pandering rather than change through strength. Get In, Get Rich, Get Out was the opportunist mindset that treated hip hop like a game, beat it, and then left–it manifested itself in the nihilist themes of status display and callous disregard, and became the underlying ethos behind popular rap.

The current popular hip hop scene rewards any opportunist apathetic enough to stand in place and recite the same garbage until the final check clears. These people don’t even care about fame; whether because their reality still demands a hardened pragmatism, or because it has become itself a part of the hip hop tradition, they perpetuate the trivialization of hip hop into nothing, and then get it done with.

Lil Wayne marks a new era of popular hip hop, because while he revels in the same themes that destroyed it, his devotion to the art form is sincere, and his thematic conceits serve as jumping points for his real passion, which is rapping. The thematic tenets of hip hop are non sequiturs when placed in the context of his real life. And he’s serious when he talks: “I haven’t found nothing that excites me more. Pussy, no. Money don’t even do it for me. I hate strip clubs, so that’s not what I’m going to do. If I ain’t onstage, I’m in the studio. I’m only going out when you pay me. I don’t see nothing more exciting than doing a new song.”

This isn’t pragmatism. The exuberance that parlayed Wayne to the top of the rap hierarchy last year comes from the satisfaction he gets from doing something he enjoys, and being very good at it. His command over syntax and meter and language ensures that, for now, he is the best rapper alive, but his commitment to such a fickle enterprise is what signifies him as a person of interest. He raps like an opportunist because he wants to be famous, but he doesn’t adhere to the mindset that defines opportunism. This makes him more like an artist, someone with intrinsic motivation for their creations: fame, fortune, respect, and 80,000 constructed sentences to date. He wants to build monuments to a dead art form with a new vibrancy on a perpetually evolving language. Let him try.

Except in the same interview he gets indignant about longevity in hip hop. “Hell no. When I’m 30 or 35, I don’t want to be into this shit no more. I want to own a basketball team, or some kind of team.” He might actually be the greatest trickster of all time.