You get the sense listening to E-40 that he’s having fun with it. Like, not just hustling, not just getting his story across, not just demonstrating his tongue-twisting, dictionary-shredding virtuosity because he can, but, like a soloist in the early days of jazz, because he takes seriously the business of delight. Not that there isn’t muscle in what he does—he once rapped that he wears glasses to look like a square, but if you see him in a fight with a bear, help the bear. But between the slang, the style, and the ease with which it all rolls off his tongue, his best tracks infuse even the streetiest street rap with a wit and lightness that make him an utter individual, at once one of rap’s most respected figures and its most enduring outsiders. And that, as he was saying years before JAY-Z even heard the word, is fo' sheezy.