Day 168: "Moment of Clarity" – The Prefix, 2004I'm beginning to feel a bit like a broken record talking about some of Lil Wayne's patterns over the years, but let's lay this out again: There's no way to understand Wayne's shift from Hot Boy to Best Rapper Alive without discussing his admiration of Jay Z. His beloved Sqad Up tapes are more or less an appeal to East Coast rap types to take him as seriously as the artists who originally rapped on the beats he uses. In the midst of them, he flipped Nas's Jay Z diss track "Ether" on there and turned it into a pro-Jay track. A few years later—as he raps here, "I don't need the Hot Boys, I still keep my heat / and I ain't gotta squad up, I still keep my feet"—Wayne went so far as to make a Jay Z homage tape, The Prefix, in the months leading up to Tha Carter. On it, he raps over most of the Black Album tracks, which seems a little presumptuous in hindsight but, also in hindsight, works out OK because we know where it was headed. Still, this isn't unlike, say, Young Thug deciding to make an entire album dedicated to Kanye West right now.Anyway, it worked out pretty well. Wayne proved he could hang on these tracks. I mean, he rapped all of "Moment of Clarity" as one verse that weaves together Mase, 9/11, and the time Wayne shot himself by accident. He starts the song—and the mixtape—with bars as hard and as complex as the opening of Wu-Tang Clan's "Triumph": "Change mind sporadically, same time compatibly / Wayne Carter, graduate, Bang Bang Academy / change my reality, thank God for grabbin' me / sort of like Him, 'cause they can't stop the wrath of me." You can thank that same God for granting Wayne this moment of clarity. Was he in Jay's league? Possibly, but that's a whole new chapter to come…Follow Kyle Kramer on Twitter.