Decoded (45 page)

8.
Again, my exercise in the song largely consists of lifting guns (an “eight” is a .38) and quantities of drugs. This also reminds me of a photo of Shaq lifting Kobe after the Lakers won their first championship in the Kobe/Shaq era. (One of Shaq’s nicknames is “Diesel” and Kobe wears the number 8.)

9.
Felix Trinidad is a boxer who knew his way around the ring, and when your ring joins your watch, so will I.

MY 1ST SONG

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1.
“Chips” is slang for money, and championships, which relates to Hakeem Olajuwon, who won multiple championships in the NBA in college.

2.
The rhyme scheme here is pretty dense. The pace is double-time and the lines are all stuffed with internal rhymes, which gives the song the breathless rhythm of my earliest songs, when I was essentially a speed rapper.

3.
“Me, Myself and I” was a song by De La Soul, a trio that featured the rapper Trugoy.

4.
Brain scientists are actually starting to discover that this is true: The only way we learn how to take responsibility is to take risks when we’re young—which, if you’re not under regular adult supervision, usually means fucking up, playing with fire, getting burned. But it’s not the kid’s fault—it’s his nature. The fault is in a society that doesn’t protect him from himself.

5.
“Ain’t No Half-Steppin” was a hit in the eighties by Big Daddy Kane. It sampled “Ain’t No Half-Steppin” by Heatwave, a funk group in the 1970s. Kane’s version has in turn been sampled a dozen times in other rap songs.

6.
This is a song about hunger, and a big part of being hungry is never slipping, never missing a chance to strike. One of the great lessons to me was in 1998, when DMX released two number one albums in the same year. It was crazy. But he was hot, and he proved that the market would support an artist who was willing to supply it while he was at his peak of popularity. It takes a serious work ethic to keep up that kind of production at a high level.

7.
I’m doing a bad Prince impersonation with this line, referencing his line in “Adore,”
You could burn up my clothes / smash up my ride (well, maybe not the ride).
Of course, my breakup with the music biz wasn’t permanent, but the message of the song is still true.

YOUNG GIFTED AND BLACK

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1.
The song starts with a quotation from Louis Farrakhan.

2.
It’s become a cliché among comics to do the “white people drive like this, black people drive like this” joke, but I’m trying to go a little deeper into the differences between us and “y’all.” And the
y’all
doesn’t just refer to race; a lot of these differences happen with people who share a race but differ in economic class.

3.
My mom is at work trying to buy me the right gear, but that means she can’t be at home checking up on me. The value of two parents isn’t just sentimental, it’s practical. My real mom worked her ass off trying to make ends meet, but since she was doing it alone, no one was ever really there for me to come home to when I was a kid.

4.
Straight jobs are scarce; crooked ones are much easier to find. It’s “right there” in front of my sight, unavoidable. Certain kids never think about not going to college because college graduates are everywhere they look. It doesn’t make them smarter or more moral, they’re just followers, like most people. For other kids, everywhere they look they see the drug game. They’re not stupid or immoral, they’re just following what they see.

5.
And, of course, the dream is that selling the drugs will get you out of the hood. But more times than not, you get out by going to jail. Damn.

6.
Outside of the ghetto, comfortable kids download music about our lives; but in the ghetto, we’re living in those crosshairs.

7.
I mean straight in the sense of being okay, fine, taken care of, but I’m also referring to hair. Black women wear weaves made out of horsehair, in some cases, trying to emulate the naturally straight hair of white women.

8.
Some of what I’m talking about here is the idealized vision that kids in the ghetto have about white people in the suburbs. We assume that their lives are carefree and happy, which is, of course, not necessarily true.

9.
The metal can refer to prisons or bullets. Even their screams can’t be heard.

10.
“A block away from hell” is how I put it in “Where I’m From.”

11.
My cousin fell out of a project window. The bars on the window weren’t on right. It’s the kind of tragedy that makes you question God about the disparities in the way people live. When niggas in the game get shot, it’s tragic in its way, but you can maybe argue that they knew what was up when they got into that life. But when it happens to a kid, you realize that there’s something even more troubling going on in the universe, and you start wanting an answer. Or worse, you get used to it.

HELL YEAH (PIMP THE SYSTEM) / DEAD PREZ, FEATURING JAY-Z

Back to Lyrics

1.
This is a surprising collaboration to both our fan bases, because we’re often thought of as representing entirely different aspects of hip-hop—which is true, in a way. But for all the beefs and rivalries, I’ve always seen hip-hop as a collective and never let anyone, even the fans, get me to believe that I’m doing something different, or more (or less) acceptable, than a group like Dead Prez.

2.
The line “slipping through the cracks” connects the “drugs to be sold” and the “holes” that need to be plugged up. And the “drug to be sold” is, of course, crack.

3.
I chose Portland because it’s the whitest place I could think of. I’m the “first black in the suburbs,” but the idea is that I get there through my music, not by actually living there. The music gets everywhere.

4.
This is based on the way the cops, even today, stalk rappers like they’re criminals.

5.
The media, in particular, has probably devoted as much time to complaining about rap music as they ever have over the real shit that goes on in the hood. The hypocrisy is stunning.

6.
Becky is considered a classic white-girl name among black folks (and is also slang for a sexual act that is associated with white girls, for some reason). And no matter how much her parents want her to stay sheltered, popular music, of all things, teaches her about how the rest of the country lives.

7.
The so-called “wigger” is ridiculed and stigmatized, in part because he scares the shit out of the powers that be, who see their next generation being influenced by a culture they despise.

8.
Vietnam is obviously a metaphor for a place of warfare and violence, like the gang violence implied by the blue rag. Vietnam is also one of the many nicknames for my hometown of Brooklyn—they call it Brooknam—because it could feel like a war zone.