Deciphering Big Sean, Joey Bada$$, and Ab-Soul’s Red Bull Spiral Freestyle
Big Sean opens by cracking mirrors and rearranging word families, Ab-Soul turns comic-book physics into a threat, and Joey Bada$$ closes by dragging the solar system down to the battle stage.
The Spiral session opens with a blast of competitive camaraderie, and all three emcees treat the one-take challenge as an excuse to knot every bar with double meaning. What makes the cypher glow is not just the density of references but the way each artist bends those references into arguments about movement, relevance, and legacy. Big Sean trains his gaze on cycles of complacency; Ab-Soul razors through assumptions about his career arc; Joey Bada$$ rewinds the old coastline fault while reminding anyone listening that constellations, not timelines, decide his orbit. The result is five dizzy minutes where Detroit, Carson, and Brooklyn treat metaphysics like sport, ricocheting historical footnotes, pop-cultural Easter eggs, and inside-baseball rap lore off the boom bap instrumental (provided by Python P), daring the listener to keep up. Beneath the wrists-flicking bravado, there is a coherent motif: freedom arrives when you can manipulate language so completely that it stops being language and starts behaving like gravity.
Sean sets the tone with “you goin’ nowhere fast,” a carnival image immediately complicated by the carousel line that follows—round-and-round inertia disguised as motion, even he feels out of place compared to the other MCs featured here. He wasn’t any slouch, despite the feelings towards Better Me Than You. His carousel becomes the opposite of the Copernican heliocentric insight Joey will summon later: here, the world spins, but the rider never really moves, a quiet indictment of hustle culture. From there, he rips into a taut chain of homophones—“reach for peace/piece…hope you have two”—folding a caution about gun reliance into a prayer for wholeness. The father-son quip (“a lotta y’all my seeds, I see Jhené shoulda had you”) only lands because real life backs it; Sean and Jhené Aiko welcomed their own son, Noah, in 2022, so the seed metaphor is literal, humorous shade rooted in biography rather than idle boast. When he flips “sixth sense” into simple addition—“like when you add two”—the pun works on several planes: math, childhood counting, and ghost-sense intuition.
His nod to Angie Stone (“dropped gems, went diamond but my favorite is Angie Stone”) is a neat geological stack: diamonds, gems, and the singer whose debut album is literally titled Black Diamond. Moments later, the Katie Holmes joke (“drive back…cruise control”) leverages her past marriage to Tom Cruise, turning a tabloid surname into a sly flex about steady navigation. The Hall & Oates couplet doubles the pun: to “hold the notes” riffs on sustained vocal runs, while the blue-eyed soul duo’s own “I Can’t Go for That” winks at Sean’s refusal to settle for half measures. By the time he concludes with “B-I-G minus the East and West beef,” he has mapped personal stature onto one of hip-hop’s most tragic civil wars, claiming the Notorious mantle without the coffin—an invocation whose weight relies on the historical carnage of that rivalry. Even the Mafioso kiss imagery (“you gotta kiss me from right to left cheek”) slides in under that umbrella, a reminder that Don-hood demands ritual respect.
Ab-Soul’s entrance feels like someone puncturing the cypher’s fourth wall. “Fuck it, let me remove the cap” means both tossing Sean’s bucket hat back at him and stripping away pretense. He mock-quotes anonymous naysayers (“career in the trash”) only to threaten glass-shattering velocity, framing himself as a projectile rather than a casualty. The Superman scheme (kryptonite, cape, “lowest lane”) is classic Soul: Marvel-level geekery colliding with battle-rap aggression. The fact that “Lois Lane” morphs into “lowest lane” rewrites DC mythology into a diss aimed at grounded competitors while the bird-plane swerve re-stamps the Superman catchphrase in real time. Next, he punishes featherweight MCs for being “paper thin,” a phrase that slyly nods at MC Lyte’s 1988 cut of the same name while also cracking a joke about broke rappers whose checks weigh nothing.
The Shabba Ranks bar (“even if you was related to Shabba, you wouldn’t make rank”) links Jamaican dancehall royalty’s military-sounding surname to the idea of status, dismissing rivals as unpromotable privates. Soul also keeps the intra-crew politics transparent—“still TDE ‘til 3000 and forever”—planting a flag that the Pro Era/TDE sparring is a healthy sport, not destructive beef. His reference to Daylyt (“all of y’all would’ve had to shoot”) drags in the infamous battle rapper known for stripping and even faking bowel movements mid-battle—an example of shock gimmicks that Soul insists he never needed to resort to. By the time he hands the hat back to Sean, the verse has turned a throwaway accessory into a relay baton of supremacy.
Joey Bada$$ closes with a telescopic flourish, zooming out from turf wars to cosmic law. “From BK to Carson, I’m bar none” situates geography as a framing device; the claim is that bar work nullifies miles. He extends Ab-Soul’s Superman lexicon into full extraterrestrial status (“they don’t want the war with the Martian”) and flips polite deference into punning salute—“I’m the one who Ab salute.” The JAY-Z echo (“since ‘Ruler’s Back’ they been tryin’ to measure up”) bounces off Slick Rick lineage while nodding to the intro on The Blueprint, reaffirming Joey’s fixation on rap monarchy. His memory of Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse functions as a lineage checklist and gauntlet; a decade later, Kendrick’s warning about “sensitive rappers” still rings, so Joey positions himself as the caretaker of that competitive spirit.
He escalates with a rapid-fire cultural mash-up: “These bars could put Bad Boys on Death Row,” a line that merges New York’s shiny-suit brand with Los Angeles infamy and feels extra spicy given that both Sean Combs and Suge Knight are actually incarcerated in 2025 (also, “Yo, I was at the party but I never seen a freak off” leaves Joey wide open for a drag, knowing the trial is active). The Daylyt dissection continues: daylight saving, eclipses, Copernican heliocentrism—Joey treats astronomy like weaponry, making Daylyt the sun momentarily blotted out by his own planet-sized shadow. His clown imagery pivots on Pierrot, the melancholy jester archetype whose white mask hides sadness; calling inevitable trolls “weirdos who wear a mask like Pierrot” drip-feeds art-history shade into a bar fight From there, he reorganizes the solar system: “when I plan, it aligns,” “Daylyt gettin’ eclipsed,” “supernova aura”—each celestial verb freighted with astronomical precision. The Copernicus callback is more than flex; heliocentrism dethroned Earth, just as Joey claims to dethrone a YouTube antagonist.
The closer crystallizes everything into a blunt threat, with a strong ASCAP and performance rights organization lines (“Get your ass capped tryna fuck with the P-R-O”). “No fly zone…still gon’ pack ’Lyt” layers TSA metaphors over battle etiquette, implying he can ground opponents or carry them overhead at will. Even the cassette-deck punchline works like time travel—old-school technology “popping out” suggests Joey can rewind or fast-forward the culture on command. By the final flourish (“I ain’t gotta lose no sleep to break Daylyt”), the freestyling has dissolved into astral mechanics where sleep, time, and eclipses blur. But wait, there’s more! Joey finally gets at Ray Vaughn: “Shouldn’t give you niggas time of day/But fuck it, shine a light on ‘em, I’mma light Ray/Now how can I say this all in a nice way?/If you need the attention, tell Top he gotta pay.”
Art-wise, Joey’s advantage is momentum-stacking. Sean’s carousel and Soul’s kryptonite schemes each bloom outward, but Joey chains imagery vertically: Copernicus, supernovas, no-fly zones and cassette decks all orbit the eclipse gag, so every punchline feels like another gravity well collapsing into the same star. He also lands the trickiest multilingual pun of the set—“ain’t no daylight saving, no sun shining”—which works only because Ab-Soul’s earlier Superman bars primed listeners for cosmic talk. That intertextual hand-off gives the closer a relay-race thrill that neither earlier verse can replicate on its own.
So the cypher’s beauty is balance; each rapper thrives in a different gear, but if you’re forced to crown one, the consensus energy and the tightly coiled structure of Joey Bada$$’s finale edge him ahead. He walks off with the loudest applause because he turns the locomotive of the first two verses into a launchpad, blasting the whole freestyle past Earth’s atmosphere. In a format built on escalation, the artist who sticks the landing usually wins, and this time, the judges are the audience counts and the instantaneous social-media roar. By those measures, and by the sheer elegance of making astronomical metaphysics sound like a street-corner dare, Joey claims the belt.