Day 28: "Lick Shots (10,000 Bars)" – Sqad Up Vol. 7 (10,000 Bars), 2002You get the sense, over the past few beats, that Lil Wayne is warming up for his final run of "10,000 Bars," since he keeps expressing surprise at the beat choice and kind of meandering through freestyles before suddenly laying into this one. He's saved both a few prime lines and a few prime flows for last, comparing his money to "Bill Gates's piggy bank" and jump roping through a sequence of internal rhymes around hips/tits/chicks/bricks/etc.He provides a handy overview of most of the project's main themes, with an emphasis on the idea that he's the "youngest soldier come with it," and while there's an aura of completion that comes from that focus, it's also hard not to see the continued repetition of these themes as a declaration that, while Wayne has torn through nearly 10,000 bars, he could go on like this forever. And so you might interpret his chanting of "Holler at me, I'm still not done," as a simple statement of fact about what remains for the track but also as a declaration of intent: Wayne isn't going anywhere any time soon. And as if to prove it, the 10,000th bar comes mid-thought—"one week in Jamaica come back with an accent"—followed by a cackle of triumph. This bar doesn't matter any more or less than the one before or after. They all matter, and they'll keep going on forever. This is just the beginning.Follow Kyle Kramer on Twitter.