For hip-hop heads that have followed the rap culture from the gutter, we all bear witness that freestyle videos have been an unavoidable part of the culture.
With the advent of the internet ushering in channels like Zimcelebs TV and national radio stations with rap-centered slots like the Fixx on ZIFM and StarFM’s TXO, performing freestyle on air has become a rite of passage for young rappers, and an outlet for legends to flex their muscles.
Last Friday, February 14. 2020, The day was supposed to go down in history as a day where we all celebrate our love for one another because per mundane standards, it was Valentine’s Day.
Little did we know that we even had better things coming on the day in the world of music.
Hip-hop rapper Noble Stylz made a monstrous appearance on Zimceleb TV’s Ndipe Mic-Nginikez Mic Reloaded Episode 5 and professed his love for the battle rap.
He dropped the best freestyle We’ve ever heard. We’ve been trying, since Friday, very hard to qualify that statement To find a reason not to give something We had just heard the best ever distinction. We thought about some titillating and hilarious freestyles we’ve been hearing in recent years, some that got us to sing out Hossana, Hallelujah to the Most High.
But finding a way not to call the Masofa Panze head honcho’s Valentine freestyle the best would be a self-conscious attempt at some sort of performative critical sobriety.
On this, the Prince of Puns went in for three minutes in one take with like three breathing breaks over an equally monstrous sound beam layered by Quazor.
In those three minutes, Noble weaves so many different literary devices in his verses that we lost count. Its analogues and allegories.
Alliteration and assonance. Metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, humour, sarcasm, satire and drama compatibly put out with an opponent in mind.
With each switching break, he dramatically looks both left, right and back as if to check if there was any challenge in the vicinity, and before you could let the previous verse simmer, he will resume constructing other complex rhyme schemes on top of one another, sometimes even switching cadence and breath pattern to articulate and distinguish multiple rhyme structures within the same line.
He cited Osama Bin Ladin, Chaminuka, and 50 Cent. Mr. Bin and Trace Magazine and Charlie Chaplin. King Pinn.
It’s witty and powerful and inspirational. And it banged.
For someone who has followed the rapper for a minute now, it was an unambiguous articulation of the beautiful mind Noble Stlyz possesses: a brain with enough power not only to construct such a tour de force, but to memorize it (at the inception of the freestyle he said the freestyle was a recollection of some of his classical verse from God-knows-when).
The point of this exercise was not simply to establish that Noble Stylz is one of the greats in the pantheon of hip-hop lyricism.
He earned that claim years ago and to this is still improving his skills. In the combative, Darwinian world of hip-hop, a place where one’s status as an exemplar of the form is as ephemeral as the Sexiest Man Alive title, this is no small accomplishment.
The densely arrayed metaphors, the calibrated poise, and casual displays of erudition all point to an artist who remains thoroughly in control of his gifts.
His performance was expectedly amazing and if you haven’t checked the freestyle yet, go do that. Now.
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