At first the 2 Chainz moniker was just another in his endless chain of boasts. Tity 2 Chainz got on two bracelets/ Fresh off the lot you would think I was racing, he rapped on Playaz Circle’s should’ve-been-a-hit “Look What I Got,” but when he started to take off, Tit retrofitted his new name as a loose homonym for “to change.” Revisiting his work chronologically, this progression feels like less of an improvement than a refinement. Sometimes it seems like the work of a man who is actively trying to unlearn the values of his era. Small traces reveal his generational allegiances do remain. The title T.R.U. REALigion, for example, stitches the type of sloppy acronym that Goodie Mob or Wu-Tang Clan might’ve used—“The Real University”—onto an expensive pair of jeans.

So he’s gotten more efficient, moving away from anything resembling a coherent message and towards the strings of disconnected punch lines that dominate rap in the wake of Lil Wayne. He’s also adapted to the modern ad-lib, punctuating his verses with an infectious 2 Chu-ainz, a catchphrase that has caught on to the point where it’s not uncommon for fans to bark it at him from passing cars. Beyond that, he raps like he talks: coldly, with brevity and a touch of humor that is so subtle it’s occasionally undetectable. His raps are delivered calmly but with a restraint that implies aggression, always in italics, never caps. The rhymes are simplistic on their surface, but he possesses a knack for repetition and alliteration that would make Cam’ron proud, and a sense of internal logic that rewards a focused listen. In short, he’s probably a lot smarter than he seems, but it also seems like he doesn’t want you to know that. On Gucci Mane’s “Get It Back,” he boasts, You date her, then you fuck her/ I fuck her, then I date her. This is a classically 2 Chainzian line; another rapper would be proud to simply fuck your girl, but to him timelines are important.

Maybe this is because he’s sitting at the end of such a long one. The second act that he’s currently experiencing is largely unprecedented in hip-hop. Long-term bit players rarely become stars, particularly this late in their careers, yet he speaks of the ascension as if it were inevitable, divine even. “People said [Playaz Circle] didn’t do good numbers-wise but I’m confident in the material even up to this day,” he says. “A lot of rappers who maybe didn’t [sell] well damn near committed suicide but I always thought there was something wrong with everybody else. They didn’t get it.”

Perhaps more directly, he brags on T.R.U. REALigion’s opening track, “Got One,” The crazy thing about it, I been known I had it/ I was being patient, y’all was being stagnant. It’s a distinction of slight degrees, but slight degrees are 2 Chainz’ forte. The difference between Tity Boi and 2 Chainz is so minuscule that it’d be easy to mistake it for stagnation from a distance. It’s not. Tit spent more than a decade repeating himself, evolving at a snail’s pace until the right lanes opened for him to advance to stardom. If this is, in fact, a work of strategy and not sheer dumb luck (or, as he suggests, pre-destiny) then it’s an impressive one.

After the quick tour of his home, 2 Chainz heads back to the city’s downtown, posting in the Benihana parking lot, rushing his way through the photo shoot for this magazine’s cover while Keisha and Heaven eat without him. Seemingly exhausted by the pace and tedium of rap stardom, he sighs. “I’m trying to be Superman,” he says, and dashes out of the proverbial phone booth with enough time to enjoy the last 20 minutes of the meal in private.