Hip-hop has always embraced metafiction. In the next track—“Da Art of Storytellin’ (Pt. 2)”—Big and Dre deliver a pair of verses about the last recording they’ll ever create due to an environmental apocalypse. We’ve long had emcees rhyming about the potency of their own rhymes. But I have never heard a song attribute the end of the world to a rhyme. In the middle of Dre’s verse, he nudges us to understand that there’s something more happening in this song: “Hope I’m not over your head, but if so you will catch on later.”
