It doesn't matter whether sonorous squirrel Justin Bieber is good at rapping. It doesn't matter if, as rumored, his supposed freestyles are actually ghost-written and pre-rehearsed. If Justin Bieber wants to rap, he will rap, and the world will listen.

This new video of Bieber's Disney Channel freestyle over Notorious B.I.G.'s "Who Shot Ya" is causing convulsions in the comments section of rap blogs and YouTube. "They gon' play that after they shot him for that," writes RapRadar commenter Capeman. Although blog-friendly rapper Lil B tweeted ecstatically about the fact that Bieber dropped in his patented "cooking dance" at the end.

It's the latest step in Bieber's inevitable transformation into the world's most popular rapper (Most hated? Same thing), using his alter ego "Shawty Man." Around a year ago, the committee of lizardpeople who secretly guide Justin Bieber's career decided he would become a rapper now that his voice's dropped below dolphin-mating-call-frequency, and since then Bieber's been rapping on radio stations around the country, more or less successfully, assiduously avoiding even a single uncouth line about, say, his endless trips to the Playboy Mansion. He even rapped on one of his Christmas songs.

When the Shawty Man-Drake collaboration inevitably hits the top of the charts sometime in 2012, propelled by 14-year-old girls on Twitter, there will be a lot of jawing on about how Bieber "killed" hip hop or something. Nah—R&B and pop are still doing fine after Bieber's years-long rampage. It's not like Steampunk, which Justin Bieber really did utterly destroy.

[via The Awl]