Off The Head, Like a Toupee’ Thats What Lu Say
“You gon kick a written or a freestyle”, these words echo out of Sway’s voice with a powerfull sentiment, Lupe then responds that he’s going to flow off the top of the head, thats the only way he he nows how.
Now this isnt the first time we’ve seen Lupe spit a true FREEESTYLE rap live on a radio show, but it most likely is the best. Off the dome freestyles are a pretty polarizing concept, because as cool as it is to hear someone spontaneously create rhymes as the beat plays it can often become boring if the artists doesn’t maintain an interesting cadence and more importantly make some kind of sense.
These type of thing used to be more prevalent, not just with emcees who specialized in it like JUICE or Supernatural , but really most rappers were preppared to “come off the top”. Sometime in the mid/late 90’s it became the norm to kick some kind of written when performing for any kind of audience so as to better show off an emcees talent. This wasn’t some kind of plague or anything, a lot of GREATTT sessions came as a result of this concept, Notorious B.I.G spitting his bars from “Nobody Till Somebody Kills You” on the wake up show (hosted by Sway fyi) comes to mind, and although he displayed a really good proficiency for rhyming off the top as well there are a huge amount of different early Eminem verses that were spit pretty much exclusively on radio shows (“I’m about to slice you like a ginsu, anything you say can and will be used against you”).
True freestyle spitting has made a resurgence of sorts in the last few years with a number of emcees employing the technique, the A$AP Mob has been known to spit 20+ minute freestyle sessions, Kendrick has constantly blessed us with not just the introspective writtens he’s known for but also off top shenanigans.
SO, all that being said, Lupe drops a just incredibly well pieced together, intricate and highly spilt milk face inducing freestyle, check it out
“[Sway] Was you gonna fuck Kanye up, when you turned the mic off
Cause I woulda done the same thing, if that Ni**ga tried to strike off”
“You Wak Motha Fuckers”
*They also hint at a possible mid August release date for Lupe’s upcoming album Tetsuo & Youth, we think that sounds about right.
