You can’t find “Duffle Bag Boy” legally. The song, which hit #15 on Billboard back in the fall of ’07, doesn’t exist on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, or Tidal. (There’s a rip of the music video on Youtube, but it’s censored and missing the intro where Lil Wayne says “Weed and syrup ’til I die…as a matter of fact it’s gon’ kill me.”) In fact, almost the entire Playaz Circle catalog, the duo 2 Chainz got his start in during the 2000s when he still went by Tity Boi, was scrubbed from streaming services some time in the last four years, presumably due to a copyright claim against the duo’s name. So if you’re just tuning in, it might look like 2 Chainz crawled out of the darkness in 2011, fully formed, drinking champagne on the airplane. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

For one, 2 Chainz knows how fortunate he is. Daniel Son ; Necklace Don, his third project this year, is informed—at points consumed—by the circumstances in which Tauheed Epps grew up. From “Ghetto”: “Used to stay with my cousins, heat the house up with the oven/Airport tried to make us move without paying us/We told ’em, ‘We ain’t budging.’” At the end of that song, he gives a quick monologue where he says he’s “thankful for everything that [he’s] been through, for every seed that’s been planted.” And that’s what makes his insane, Technicolor flossing so joyous—it’s grounded in grainy cartoons watched over stolen cable.

That’s not to say 2 Chainz is a stickler for realism. *DS ; ND *has rims on ambulances, weddings at Benihanas, condos on Jupiter. He buys mansions just to shoot dice in; he leaves his mom’s house with a thousand Nikes. Or maybe he’s at Waffle House, snapping you back to real life: “Patty melt with the hash browns, trying to avoid all the pat-downs.”

The last quote is from “Big Amount,” which sounds like you’re playing *Ocarina of Time *deep in College Park. After 2 Chainz wears Yeezys to dinner and honks at pedestrians and pours water (Voss only, nothing less) on women, Drake pops up with his best verse all year. He raps about not wanting to rap, calls himself “a J. Prince investment,” is visited by the ghost of Michael Jackson, pays tribute to Bankroll Fresh, and has a nervous breakdown when someone suggests staying at the Marriott.

It’s funny, it’s specific, it’s vivid—because when you’re rapping next to 2 Chainz, you don’t have a choice. Speaking generally, it’s tough to rap through middle age. (Nas might be the only famous rapper to succeed in dealing with that transition in long form.) Those who enjoy do critical success on the other side of 40 tend to be narrow-lensed specialists like Raekwon, or to be totally unmoored from questions of time or conventional identity like DOOM or Aesop Rock. 2 Chainz is joining that short list because his style is equal parts daring and durable: he’s going to write the most distinct, disorienting, and immutably *fun *verses in the entire genre.

And he’s developed into an excellent technician. On “Get Out the Bed,” the passage “Gladiator, tell your neighbor/Gun on table, Buick LeSabre/Do ya now, do ya later/Dice game, pool table/Two flavors, too anxious” is razor-sharp, as is “Kilo” or the YFN Lucci-assisted “You in Luv Wit Her.”

But again, 2 Chainz isn’t going to leave the past behind. The tape’s penultimate song, the DJ Spinz-produced “Blessing,” blends the excess with heartbreak. It opens: “When I’m alone in my room, sometimes it look like the mall/In the back of my mind, I ball harder than y’all/I used to have an old school that I sat on some dubs/For the first time in my life, mama knew I sold drugs.” It’s the at-what-cost moment that bridges cold nights from his childhood with the gloss of the present. Unsurprisingly, 2 Chainz brings it to life the way few others could.