by Jay-Z
8. Marijuana dipped in angel dust or PCP.
9. Her inability to deal with his death turns her into an addict.
10. I flash back to her meeting the father of her son, her son’s murderer, when she was basically her son’s age. And this feeling is real, too: Just because shit is hard doesn’t mean that there isn’t real romance in the hood! The moon shines, the stars come out. Isis is just like anyone else; she wanted to indulge herself and get lost in the fantasy of love for one night.
11. “I Wonder if I Take You Home” was a hit for Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam.
12. In the flash back you see her as a young girl thrilled by the fast life, rejecting a good dude who wanted to escape the city, for Mike, a guy who turned her on by being a thug.
13. Romance in the hood is a funny thing. All around the world, women fall for the bad guy, the strong, aggressive one who offers a sense of excitement or danger. It’s a cliché, practically. But in the hood, the bad guy is a different character with a different fate from the guy in a romance novel. The bad guy in the hood doesn’t always have a way to channel that aggression. His strength is frustrated by a system that rejects him, and his aggression is channeled into illegal acts. The excitement isn’t controlled—there’s no safety net when he falls off that highwire. The bad boy might grow up to be a hard man, if he grows up at all. The street fight that turns the girls on when he’s sixteen is less sexy when he’s a grown-ass man. And god help the girl that’s got his child.
14. The flashback ends abruptly. Like a fake pass, you think I’m going to quarterback Isis’s story, but now we pick up Mike’s story: Like a lot of immature boys suddenly faced with fatherhood, he squirms free with a weak denial. Fifteen years later he’s still in the same streets.
15. I fast-forward to the near past in the song, the night father and son meet in the street. Their confrontation is between father and son, but the subtext is the intergenerational schism. These are fearless, fatherless young boys feeling they owe no respect to the generation of men above them.
16. Mike, who hasn’t seen his own son since he denied him fourteen years before, is not only faced with a familiar face when he sees his son, but with a newer, presumably more expensive gun, implying that his son’s hustle is a higher risk, higher benefit hustle. Father and son carry the same gun, a .38; it’s just that the son’s cost more.
17. It’s in this pause that I establish the son’s humanity, but also his vulnerability. I also show my partiality: I’m on the son’s side. Not only does he have the drop and the better gun, but he’s also got the moral high ground. He pauses when he sees the man’s face. You get the sense that he’s studied every face he’s seen his whole life, looking for the face of his father. And now here it is. It freezes him.
18. The older man has spent a life in the streets honing his survival skills. Where the son instinctively pauses, the father’s only reflex is to act, quickly, in the name of self-preservation. It’s the same instinct he exercised when he was still a kid and left his son behind. All he knows is war and survival, and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
19. The last two phrases are just slight plays on each other. In the first refrain it refers to this specific story, but in the second, it becomes more general, more generational. I never intended “Meet the Parents” to be subtle. In my mind it was a morality play, a PSA for that generation of men who may as well have emptied their guns on their sons when they left their lives. The streets where Mike left his son to be raised are the same streets where he buries him.
20. And the title to the song has dual meanings, too. The song is about a son meeting one of his parents, but it’s also a more general introduction to the listener: It’s impossible to understand this generation of kids, the hip-hop generation, till you meet the parents.
WHERE I’M FROM
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1. I start the song with an image that’s visual and aural, solid and ethereal. “Hammer” is a hard word for guns, but here the hammers ring. This sets up the listener’s perspective as an observer, not a participant, which is the perspective of most folks in the projects, like the women and kids who hear gunshots as echoes bouncing off concrete walls, ringing like wind chimes through their kitchen windows. The song’s first image is like my first experience of violence, not as the trigger man but as the kid in his apartment playing with his toys, hearing that distinctive pounding ring out in the background.
2. “Two young men who admitted that they had raped and sodomized a 39-year-old woman and then thrown her from the roof of a four-story building in Brooklyn last year were sentenced yesterday to terms of 6 to 18 years in prison. … Her case, whose shocking brutality was comparable to that of the Central Park jogger, which occurred only a few days earlier, prompted some harsh criticism of the news media, which did not devote comparable attention to it, in part, critics said, because the Central Park jogger was white and the Brooklyn victim was black.”—The New York Times, October 2, 1990.
3. It could feel like the rapture sometimes, the way someone would be there one minute, and gone the next, bagged by the cops or the coroner, or off to another state to set up business.
4. When cops showed up it was dump and run time.
5. The ambition of a drug-seller was a paradox: to stop selling drugs. To make enough loot to skate—graceful, easy—away from the whole scene.
6. Selling weight “wet” meant to sell the crack so fast it didn’t even have time to dry from the cooking. It’s cheating, but I justify it in the next line.
7. There’s a saying, “the narcissism of small differences,” that applies exactly to the way we divvied up the hood: It was projects versus projects, and then building versus building, clique versus clique, brother versus brother.
8. Well, exactly: Tompkins niggas might’ve seemed somehow different from Marcy niggas, but we were all in the same game, after the same shit, using the same techniques.
9. Hammers are ringing, drugs are being sold, cops are rolling up, girls are being fought over, fast money’s being made. And no one’s over thirty. It’s a recipe for conflict.
10. “Boosters” are shoplifters who’d slide into department stores, stuff a pile of sweaters under their worn-out goose downs, and then sell them for half price back on the streets.
11. Where I’m from, on the streets I’m describing, all you had was your word—it was everything. If you pretended to be something you weren’t, your card would get pulled quick. The legit world has a million ways to slip out of the truth; ironically, the underworld depends on a kind of integrity.
12. When I was a kid the debate was LL versus Run-DMC, or, later, Kane versus Rakim. Next year it might be Drake versus J. Cole. It’s a tribute to how deeply felt hip-hop is that people don’t just sit back and listen to the music—they have to break it down, pick the lyrics apart, and debate the shit with other fans who are doing the same thing. When people talk about forms of media, sometimes they compare lean-forward media (which are interactive, like video games or the Internet) and lean-back media (which are passive, like television or magazines). Music can be lean-back sort of media, it can just wash over you or play in the background—but hip-hop is different. It forces people to lean forward—lean right out of their chairs—and take a position.
13. The “drug czar” here obviously isn’t the one that works for the government.
14. “R-and-R” stands for “reverse and remand,” an order from a court to reverse a decision or refer it back to a lower court.
15. “Ball” has three meanings: to fuck, to spend money, and to play basketball. I’m talking about playing ball here, but I’m nodding to the other meanings, too. “Breeding” rhyme stars connects back directly to the rest of this verse: The drugs and guns, the fun and the risk, and, most of all, the survival-of-the-fittest competition, is enough pressure to crush coal into diamonds. It’s an idealized, almost romantic, way to look at this life, a sudden reverse after the song’s bleak beginning.
16. This
is a line from a remix I did with Puff Daddy (as he was then known) and Biggie for a song called “Young G’s.”
17. The churches really were the flakiest, whether they were storefronts or big old-school churches with vaulted ceilings and steeples. They were kept alive with the donations of poor folks and hadn’t seen a paint job in a minute. But more than that, they were full of fake prophets and money-snatching preachers.
18. When your prayers aren’t answered, you start to think that maybe there’s no one there to answer them. Day after day, year after year, generation after generation, the response seems to be silence—it tests your faith.
19. I’m triangulating my location. The block from hell is a double entendre: my block is in close proximity to the worst of the worst, but it’s also “the block from hell,” like it emerged from a flaming pit. “Not enough shots from stray shells,” means that where I’m from no one is really safe from a stray bullet. The last line—“an ounce away from a triple beam”—is a drug-game detail that niggas in the streets picked up on immediately. That ounce away is the difference between struggling and making real money, and a lot of hustlers stay an ounce away and never graduate. But the aspiration to move up to the triple-beam is real, and the handheld weight scale is symbolic of that street-level hustler’s hunger—you can hold his weight in your hand, but his hunger is enormous.
20. I wrote this at a time when I felt the government was irrelevant to the ways we organized, resolved conflict, and took care of ourselves. “Politic” is slang for the kind of talk that works things out.
21. “In 2001, the life expectancy in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods was 8 years shorter than in its wealthiest neighborhoods.” —“Health Disparities in New York,” New York City Department of Health.
22. The stakes are relatively low once you leave the streets. A bad review might hurt your feelings, but really who gives a fuck compared to the equivalent on the streets.
23. This is not the only time I interrogate God; in songs like “D’Evils” (p. 50), “Lucifer” (p. 286), and “Beach Chair” (p. 282) I do something similar, sometimes in a confrontational way, sometimes in a more plaintive way. But these lines aren’t about God in the traditional sense, they’re almost questions back to myself. Do I forgive guys who live just like me? It’s a question that haunts a lot of us—and the song is a defense, a case that in some ways we’re just products of our environment. But I’m not convinced that it’s that simple.
24. The “promise fulfilled” is the promise I made to God—or to myself—in the earlier line, that if I got successful, I’d let them know “exactly what takes place in the ghetto.” This song is the promise’s partial fulfillment, but the job wasn’t done—I kept trying to get deeper and deeper into the story from song to song.
25. “Clap boards” is more basketball talk—the image catches a player in the air, slapping the backboard while he grabs a rebound, the sound ricocheting through the project courtyards like a gunclap.
26. More blasphemy! Comparing the silent god Jehovah with the rap lords whose voices never left us.
27. This line feels kind of thrown off, but it’s maybe the strangest line on the whole record. I’ve been describing a place that’s full of violence, where the scramblers on the corner are trying to make enough money to move, where even God doesn’t visit, but the irony is that the stories that came out of this place—a block from hell—would make millions for the storytellers.
28. It’s hard to argue with this sentiment once you get the context. In the life I’m describing, a night’s sweetness is a treasure and worrying about the cost of it is a waste of time.
29. “Leek” is embalming fluid mixed with PCP. On the West Coast, where it’s probably more popular, they call it “sherm.” It’s famous for making people lose their minds, jump off roofs, strip themselves naked in the street and start running. It’s a suicidal high.
30. I’m describing a game of Cee-Lo—deuce, “three dice and shoot the five,” “hit ’em with trips”—a game played with three dice. On the corner we’d kill time with Cee-Lo—all you need is some dice—but the money is real, so sometimes the stakes expand.
31. The song climaxes with the narrator winning a dice game, stepping his game up to platinum, and keeping guard with a nine, while “niggas show love.” Before you get too happy, though, it brings us back to an image of paranoia and death, the cloud that hangs over a hustler’s head forever.
MINORITY REPORT
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1. These are all actual clips from the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
2. “Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States—the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops.” —Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Life and Death in New Orleans.
3. I wanted to do a song about Katrina, but I also wanted the song to be about how what we saw during the hurricane was just an extreme example of the shit that was already happening in New Orleans. The young guys there were motivated by the same desperation as the guy who loots the store after the hurricane for diapers and formula. Both are just trying to survive in a storm. If you focus only on the criminal act and lose sight of the whole chain of cause and effect, you get a distorted, unfair picture. People are often pushed into desperate acts and bad choices by circumstances.
4. I had to wonder about all those dramatic photos shot from helicopters swooping over people stranded on roofs. I have no idea if those journalists could’ve picked up the people on the roofs after they’d taken their photo, but it seemed like a metaphor for what was happening all over the country: We were all watching the story unfold but doing nothing.
5. This was a fantasy: What would happen if the situation was reversed and Bush was on the ground, surrounded by the folks of the Ninth Ward, as beautiful and fragile as orchids? And how fast would they have gotten him out?
6. Giving money is important, I think, but the people who got down there to help and put their feet in that water were heroic.
7. I repeat this line because it has two meanings. The first time it refers to the money that I donated: I can’t say that the money has made anything better. The second time, I’m referring to even further “before,” to life before the Civil Rights Movement.
DYNASTY (INTRO)
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1. “Woke up this morning / got yourself a gun …”
2. The opening of the song establishes the feeling that a lot of us had: We didn’t worship the Mafia like a lot of people thought, but we completely related to the “us vs. the establishment” mentality. That was the “key of life” for us, the thing that united us, even when we weren’t in perfect harmony.
3. Stevie Wonder connects back to the “key of life” metaphor. He famously wore beads—and “beeds” are also what folks used to call nappy hair. My mom used to call them “biddy beeds” and rub my head, which I sometimes covered with a wave cap, also called a do-rag. I’m trying to create a parallel between me and Stevie Wonder. He’s blind, obviously, and relies on his other senses to navigate the world. That’s how it is on the streets, too, where you have to rely on your instincts to survive and anticipate what’s going to happen before you actually see it.
4. “Ennis Cosby, Bill Cosby’s only son and an inspiration for some of the comedian’s most rollicking television humor and family antics, was shot to death early Thursday after he pulled over to the side of a Los Angeles freeway to change a flat tire.” —The New York Times, January 19, 1997.
5. Ennis was the kind of kid that a lot of us were envious of: He came from a fortune and seemed to have it all, including his dad, Bill Cosby—the ultimate American dad—while most of us came up with nothing and had never even met our fathers, much less lived with them. (I’m not sure if I was lucky or not to have gotten the chance to know my dad before he bounced.) But Ennis’s death was one of those things that sharpens your sight (which continues the blindness/sig
ht metaphor I introduced with Stevie Wonder). It reminded us of life’s frailty even for people with money and status. Money can’t protect you from fate.
6. Here I’m outside hustling, sometimes in freezing-cold weather. “Below zero” refers to my money situation as well—I’m not starving literally, but I’m hungry for success. I’m willing to do whatever to improve my situation, with no sympathy for anyone else—a survival-of-the-fittest mentality takes over, “darkens my heart.” The stress might drive me to drink, too—“’bout to get my liver.”
7. Another reference to Malcolm X’s by any means necessary—a phrase he coined to talk about political revolution and racial liberation—which is used in hip-hop as a description of getting paid by any means when your back is against the wall. We knew Malcolm was a righteous man fighting for a just cause. But we were a step beyond him in our desperation.
8. From time to time people with sense would tell us to leave “the life” alone, that there was a better way. At this point I’m becoming cynical and “suspicious” of anybody saying anything other than what I can see in front of me. So like Malcolm I was going to get it by any means and protect myself with “biscuits,” a word we used for guns, I don’t even know why. Now all of this—contradictions included—is to be ingested by the listener. I left a mess of thoughts for you to sort through. I prepared the “food”; it’s up to you to clean it up.