Day 314: "Carter II" – Tha Carter II, 2005Why might someone rap over the same beat three times on the same album? Why might someone release multiple installments of the same album instead of coming up with new titles? Why does anyone do anything?Blogging about Lil Wayne every day for a year has had a distinct effect on the way that I view Lil Wayne's work as an oeuvre of constant self-improvement. More and more, I understand rap's obsession with kung fu: rap—music at large, really—is like martial arts, a slow, gradual refinement of ideas within an established toolbox of rules and conventions. One reason rappers make songs about the same topics again and again is that those topics provide a set of rules to play around with and a set of standards by which to score their performance. We have a great sense of exactly how good Lil Wayne is with metaphors because we've heard him describe shooting people or outdoing other rappers or dodging the Feds over and over and over again, in so many different forms of language. He raps over every beat, just to practice rapping, in search of the elusive perfect bar because every time you rap the perfect bar, then that one is used up and you have to rap a new one."The chalk's only for the art, homie / how they trace ya after I erase ya?" he raps here. It's a summoning of sorts of an image of calligraphy—another art based around repetition in search of perfection—as he chips away at that old, familiar topic of shooting people. "Slow paper / is better than no paper," he says later, to echo the theme of patience. "Fast money don't last too long / you got to pace it."You've got to pace it. Just keep rapping. Another day, another song. Get better. If there's a lesson, it's that. Well, that and, "I'm ridin' for them reparations," which was all the political argument I ever needed to support the cause. Use these lessons wisely.Follow Kyle Kramer on Twitter.