Decoded (50 page)

14.
The song shifts from a general description of his life to a specific situation of danger and decision.

15.
I know once I shoot him, that’s it for me. Not only will I be a drug dealer, but also a murderer. It’s rock bottom. I’m in a situation where I’m literally shaking with fear and my gun is aimed right at his forehead.

16.
These are the moments that move fastest but linger longest. This is a kid who starts the verse seeking—but not finding—guidance in every direction and ends it having to make a life-or-death decision while his body is flooded with adrenaline and his mind clouded with fear and time is ticking off, ruthlessly demanding an answer.

17.
This is another example of how something seemingly innocent can take a turn. My mother’s love and belief in me made me think that I could have anything I wanted in this world, but without direction that ambition led me into situations I wasn’t ready for and decisions that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. Here I tried to capture in a few words that turn from an innocent kid absorbing his mother’s love to a young man old before his time burdened with unspeakable regrets.

18.
This narrator is someone who’s obviously thinking about a lost friend.

19.
These lines capture the doomed feeling of the narrator. Not only is he suicidal from the stress of the life, but he’s not even sure he’ll find an escape in death, because he’s going to go to hell for all the shit he’s done.

20.
Now the song moves to a one-sided conversation between the narrator and his dead friend.

21.
The conversation is heating up, the narrator has left the reminiscing, and he begins to enter a rage about a current situation with Newton, another old friend turned enemy.

22.
Killing Newton would fuck up his money, so he’s got to resign himself to dealing with him in some other way. But it’s going to be hard, because Newton is a problem.

23.
By the end, he realizes that he’s having a crazy conversation with someone who’s not even there. He’s so destabilized by stress and regret that he’s become “touched,” crazy enough to strategize with his dead homie about killing someone.

THIS CAN’T BE LIFE / FEATURING BEANIE SIGEL AND SCARFACE

Back to Lyrics

1.
“Bomb” is a slang term for something that’s not just good, but powerful. Something that cuts through normal life explodes like a bomb. When you come from the lowest rung of a society—from “sewage”—sometimes the only way to make noise is with an explosion.

2.
When I use lines like this, I count on people knowing who I am and my intentions, knowing that I’m not anti-Semitic or racist, even when I use stereotypes in my rhymes, like here, where I’m playing off the stereotype that Jewish people are “tight,” that is, frugal, as a way of talking about the tightness of my flows. Lyor Cohen and I joke about race and Jews and blacks every time we see each other. It’s obviously something that’s in all of our minds in one way or another, and it’s better to get it out, make fun of it, instead of being silent about it and let it start to influence you.

3.
“38 long” could be a sleeve length for arms, or it could be—and is, in this case—a type of arm, as in weapon, a .38 long handgun.

4.
Another double entendre relating to a shirt—the cuffs that my arms go through here aren’t cotton, though, they’re iron. There’s no deep hidden meaning to shirts in this song, but extending the metaphor helps to hold the thought together and make it more vivid.

5.
The voice screaming in this case is the voice in my head. Normally you think about the voice in your head as whispering to you or, at worse, having a heated conversation, but you know shit is really out of control when your conscience needs to scream to get your attention, like, “Don’t make me come out there!”

6.
Big’s
Ready to Die
dropped in 1994; his Bad Boy labelmate Craig Mack’s
Project: Funk Da World
also dropped that year.
Illmatic
also dropped that year from Nas. The significance of those three records is that they launched the resurgence of East Coast hip-hop after the West Coast had dominated the game for years.

7.
This was a sentiment that I didn’t fully allow myself back in 1994. I was rhyming, but mostly hustling. It took me a while to come to grips with the fact that I really wanted to devote myself to music. Biggie and Nas were an inspiration—but the flip side is that no one was giving me a deal. There were times when I slowed down enough to tap into that true feeling, the feeling that maybe I was going to miss out on this thing I really wanted, deep down. That despite whatever success I had on the streets, I would be a failure because I never fully chased my dream.

8.
“In shorts” shows you that these three-time felons were still just kids.

9.
This refers to something that happened to me around that time, 1994, when my girl of five years got pregnant and lost the baby in a miscarriage. Now, obviously, miscarriages happen everywhere, to anyone, but the point is that on top of the especially acute paranoia and disappointment and exhaustion I’m feeling from the street life, friends getting shot, your family being broke, I have to deal with the everyday tragedies that stalk everyone. And when that hits you, sometimes it becomes clear that you have to get out, that this really can’t be life, it has to be more.

SOON YOU’LL UNDERSTAND

Back to Lyrics

1.
There’s a lot of talk about misogyny in rap, and some of it is justified, but some of it misses the point. The world hip-hop describes is full of extremes and exaggerations, sometimes to make a dramatic point, sometimes to tell a more vivid story, sometimes for comic effect. It’s the nature of storytelling, especially if it’s done in verse, to use more dramatic language and bigger gestures than real life, and to focus on moments of extremity. But those extremes and exaggerations look ridiculous unless there’s a core of truth. Songs like “Can I Get A …” where the chorus has me chanting,
can I get a fuck you, from all of my niggas who don’t love hoes / they get no dough,
is partially a comic exaggeration and partially reflective of reality. This is a slice of the world of male-female relationships: Niggas who want to fuck without paying, bitches who want to get paid and then fuck (maybe). This isn’t the one and only way relationships work, but in the world I was in, I saw it. A lot. But in other songs, ranging from “Song Cry” to “Ain’t No Nigga,” I try paint other pictures, to show the complexities and nuances of relationships.

2.
This is a conversation between a man and woman, obviously, but more specifically, it’s a player trying to talk a friend out of turning their friendship romantic. The tricky thing is that if you take a female friend and add a sexual relationship, you have to be ready to ruin the friendship.

3.
The girl is like a sister to him so the relationship is almost incestuous. When he says
this ain’t right,
it’s the rational, ethical part of him arguing with the part that just wants to hit it.

4.
I gave her advice like a big brother who knows how careful you have to be around certain types of guys, which I know about because I’m one of them.

5.
These details let you know that this is a “good” girl, someone who has potential outside of the Life.

6.
I used the name Gina because of Gina Montana, a character in the movie
Scarface.
Gina was a good girl who was ruined by her closeness to the criminal underworld. Specifically, her big mistake was getting involved with Manny, the best friend of her brother, which mirrors the situation I’m describing.

7.
In
Scarface,
Tony eventually kills Manny when he discovers he’s involved with his sister, so there’s another pragmatic reason for avoiding this kind of complicated relationship. Still, it’s hard to be careful when it comes to your heart and it hurts to know that you’re not good enough or ready enough to do something you want to do.

8.
This is the song’s second scenario. Trife meaning trifling, of course, and it comes through in all his justifications: I told you I wasn’t ready, I don’t have the patience, I want to do right.

9.
“About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful.” —
The New York Times,
October 27, 2008.

10.
This is the big complication in so many relationships between young people. Cheating and broken hearts are just part of life when you’re young, but when there’s another life involved, the stakes are higher and things become so much more complicated and painful.

11.
Now here’s another nuance. There’s two ways of looking at this line: One is to say that the speaker in this verse has real clarity about his own shortcomings and enough integrity that he’s willing to give up the woman he loves in order to protect her. It’s a situation that he could easily take advantage of—and lots of cats do—to have a wife at home who loves him and raises his child, while also having a “different girl every night.” Or you can see this as a cop-out, a man who doesn’t bother controlling his own lusts and then pulls a “it’s not you, it’s me” line to get out of a solemn commitment, a commitment that now includes a child. Maybe both are true.

12.
The last verse is a letter from a prison cell from a kid to his moms.

13.
This is the kind of insight people normally don’t get until they’ve fucked up for good. It’s so important that kids can at least get out of adolescence without ruining their lives, because it’s not till you get older that you start to see the wisdom in what your mother tried to teach you. Before that, you ignore it until you do fuck up and the truth of it all comes crashing in, too late. Youth is wasted on the young, I guess.