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Something strange happened on last weekend's season premiere of Saturday Night Live. It wasn't Michael Phelps' endearingly awkward hosting job or Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impression. Nope, it was way weirder--Lil Wayne played electric guitar on national television.

When Wayne came out to perform "Lollipop" with a guitar slung across his back, I assumed the instrument was a simple nod to rock star iconography. For the first two or so minutes of the performance, that's all the ax was. But then, at the point when the radio version starts to fade, Wayne, gold grillz shining from his mouth, eyes hidden behind big black sunglasses, whipped the guitar around to his chest and started making noises that had me flashing back to the time I was working as a waiter and knocked over a full tray of martini glasses.

In retrospect, Wayne's rock move has been coming for some time. I've seen pictures of him with a guitar during performances from the summer. With their mock-metal guitar and thumping rhythms, some Tha Carter III tracks, like "Shoot Me Down" and "Playin' With Fire," flaunted hard rock edges. Further back, Tha Carter II's "Best Rapper Alive" was shot through with an Iron Maiden sample. And the way Weezy carried himself during the SNL performance suggested he's been taking classes at the school of rock: Grasping the mic stand with both hands, leaning into it, spitting "Lollipop" with a fire that makes the single sound lukewarm. It looked like the kind of performance you'd normally see from, say, Trent Reznor.

As anyone who's ever heard Dee Dee Ramone's rap album can attest, there's something to be said for sticking to what you do best. But Wayne's as close as modern pop music's got to a genius right now, spewing a seemingly endless stream of lyrical ingenuity, and in the era of pitch-shifting and AutoTuning, you've got to admire his willingness to try new things. Live. Before a national TV audience. Such weirdness is part of why we like him. So it's worth seeing where the man's rock star infatuation goes--even if my ears are still mad at me for not hitting mute last Saturday night.

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