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  COMING OF AGE / FEATURING MEMPHIS BLEEK

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  1. Rocks here refer to jewelry, diamonds specifically; shorties can refer to girls or to any kid, which is how I’m using it here.

  2. “In reality, we from the same building. He was the guy coming through with the fine women, fly cars … I was always the young guy looking up.” —Memphis Bleek, Making of Reasonable Doubt documentary.

  3. The “hunger pains” refer to being hungry with ambition or literally hungry, because he’s broke. Feeding someone makes him loyal, at least in the short term.

  4. He’s making just enough money to get more supply—“re-up”—and get a little gear, but he’s still in the minor leagues, looking for a promotion.

  5. This refers to the old “be like Mike” commercials. The guys who didn’t have the stomach for this life bounced from it.

  6. Slingin is slang for selling drugs. I like the way it makes you think of reckless Old West outlaws, gunslingers, which makes it work well with “bringin the drama.”

  7. Servin is also slang for selling drugs. While “slingin” feels cocky and aggressive, “servin” feels more workmanlike and submissive, which works with the lyrics here—“life could be better.”

  8. This is the glamorous life of the young hustler. It wasn’t always a simple transaction—you might find yourself doing crazy things to get paid, holding people’s welfare cards hostage, literally chasing people down the streets, staying up all night and watching the sun come up on the corner. But you do it for the possibility that one day someone will pick you as the one to step up to the next level.

  9. A little play on words that’s meant to keep the listener’s mind on how deep this conversation really is: If Bleek gets “the word” and gets deeper in the game, he’s not just going to get the Vettes and diamonds, he’s also going to have more serious consequences to pay if he fucks up—his life, in fact.

  10. This conversation starts casually then turns into an interview and then a test.

  11. These are the key lines in the song. It’s about loyalty, but it’s also a little heartbreaking how much this little nigga wants to get down. In our live shows around this time, I used to literally hand Bleek a stack of bills when we hit this line, and he would toss it out to the crowd. Dramatic shit.

  12. This is a classic piece of OG advice. It’s amazing how few people actually stick to it.

  13. “All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one.” —Tony Montana, Scarface

  14. The word “résumé” makes it sound like the end of any other job interview, but then Bleek ends with a blood vow, “until death do us part,” which reminds us that the stakes are higher than a nine to five.

  COMING OF AGE (DA SEQUEL) / FEATURING MEMPHIS BLEEK

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  1. Keenan Ivory Wayans hosted a late-night talk show that ran at the same time as Vibe’s late-night talk show, a rare moment when two late-night shows hosted by black people ran at the same time. They competed against each other, which is why Keenan was trying to “pick up on the vibe.”

  2. These details are meant to show that I’m no longer living in the same neighborhood. Instead I’m driving in from the suburbs, wearing a polo shirt, looking like the good life has made me softer than my new neighbors, who are themselves wealthy professionals, not gangsters.

  3. All of these lyrics are internal, unspoken thoughts as the two men walk toward each other. The only lines spoken aloud are the last lines in the first two verses.

  4. It’s always the one who knows the least who is the first to start trying to tell someone what to do. The farther outside the circle someone is, it seems, the more they want to stir up resentment, mostly because they don’t know better, or they’re bored and have nothing better to do.

  5. While in the first “Coming of Age” Bleek’s character was almost casual about “until death do us part,” now he realizes how serious it is to have real responsibility and actually put your life on the line.

  6. Tools is obviously slang for a gun. I like that word here because it lets you know how at the end of the day I’m a professional, and even something as personal as this can be handled as coldly and impersonally as taking a hammer to a piece of defective machinery. At the same time the rhyme here—breaking my heart/break him apart—lets you know it’s still more complicated than that for me.

  7. The shift in slang—from talking about guns as tools that break things to talking about shooting as blazing—matches the shift in tone, from cold and professional to hot and emotional. In the streets we had as many words for guns and shooting as Eskimos had for snow. A single act had a million variations in emotion and intent.

  8. All of this back and forth is happening with no actual words exchanged, but perceptive observers can see it all. The only spoken words occur at the end of each verse.

  9. I wasn’t trying to make some kind of anti-weed public service announcement, but the truth is even a minor slip can expose you. No matter how comfortable you feel, it’s best to keep your mind clear.

  10. This is a reference to the first “Coming of Age” and is the beginning of a change in tone in the song. He goes from bold to scared to humbled.

  11. This is the key line in this verse. The bond they share isn’t just that they “wilded out” in Vegas together, it’s that they’re both, ultimately, outcasts—unloved—who can depend only on each other. It’s more than the money, it’s a sense of brotherhood that bonds them.

  12. Another reference to the original “Coming of Age,” but this time it’s my character repeating Bleek’s vow from the first song: until death.

  13. This third verse, which is spoken aloud, is about loyalty that goes deep—not just two guys who came together to make money and move on, but a relationship that’s closer to kinship. You don’t make these kinds of declarations of loyalty to just anyone you happen to hustle with.

  14. In the end, I bring it back to music—and to the actual relationship between me and Bleek.

  D’EVILS

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  1. “Coming of Age” and “D’Evils” are two songs on the same basic theme. They’re both about being in the game and they both deal with competition and friendship. But the “Coming of Age” songs are about a boss dealing with the rise of someone younger, while “D’Evils” is about the relationship between peers, two people who grew up together.

  2. The “mechanics” here aren’t about the technical details of the business, but the psychological and emotional machinery that’s always working under the surface.

  3. The first defense of a lot of people who take the criminal route is that they had no choice, which is almost true: Most of us had choices, but the choices were bleak. The street life was tough and morally compromised and sometimes ugly, but a dead-end nine-to-five job at permanent entry level wasn’t all that attractive, either. The righteous seed in a hustler’s mentality was this: He wanted something more for himself.

  4. This reflects the way I actually thought: I ignored my god-given ability, never believing that someone from where I came from could make it out.

  5. The whole idea of “D’Evils” is that the narrator is no longer just expressing his ambition to live a full life—he’s been poisoned somehow, possessed with a desire for money, alienated from all that’s good, and focused on the underworld, here represented by Mafia references.

  6. The narrator isn’t thinking about redemption or turning back—he’s totally focused on making money, “ends.”

  7. “D’Evils”—this obsession with getting paid—is something the narrator picks up after he “breaks bread with the late heads,” who school him in ruthlessness.

  8. I’m describing childhood friends, who went from fighting for those blocks with ABCs on them to fighting to control buildings where they can move crack and “make a killing.”

  9. Here’s where the song takes a sudden turn from a general analysis and reminiscences to a clear na
rrative. I tried to convey a lot of information in one line: that we were friends so close that we learned basic sex ed at the same time; that he “never learned,” which sets him up as someone sloppier, less calculating and cunning than me; that he had a child as a result, and “a baby’s mother”; and that I kidnapped her, which shows how profoundly “blackhearted” I had become, violently exploiting any opening—even the innocent mother of his child. The line goes from the innocence of two dumb kids learning to use condoms together, bypasses any happiness or joy about the birth of a child, and ends in a truly dark place. It’s the poison of “D’Evils” sketched out in a few words.

  10. The “cheese” is money, which I’m feeding her to try to get her to rat out the location of her man.

  11. Extending the money-as-food metaphor, I keep feeding her larger bills till she shits out some information, the dollars breaking down to cents/sense as she digests them.

  12. This reflects another movement from innocence to violence, from slumber parties to putting her to sleep forever.

  13. In the end, I get her to do what I want, but it’s a grim victory. Not only will blood be shed based on the information she’s given me—hers and his—but the last vision of her, tears like a veil over her eyes, begging for both of their lives, is going to haunt me. Her miseries become mine.

  14. Another quick scene: Possessed by material lust, the narrator sticks up random people. The quick line of dialogue is meant to show someone completely blinded by desire, reckless and aggressive, but also haunted, the kind of character who talks to his vics as he’s robbing them, making jokes and justifying himself by saying the whole world has done him wrong, so now everyone owes him. This could be the same character from the opening verses; driven over the edge by the killing of his best childhood friend, now he’s just a raging psychopath.

  15. The song ends with a dizzying carousel of conversations: First the narrator addresses his mother, then his girl (“boo”), and finally a last victim. The narrator is completely lost to the “D’Evils.” He taunts his victims, defends himself, brags about how low he gets down, invites niggas to try to come get him, like George Bush saying “bring ’em on” to the terrorists. The final two lines, contrasting the demons in his head with a God he thinks is powerless, show how deeply he’s fallen into a moral vacuum. The song isn’t about literal demonic possession, of course, even if some sloppy listeners claim that it is; the truth is you don’t need some external demon to take control of you to turn you into a raging, money-obsessed sociopath, you only need to let loose the demons you already have inside of you.

  99 PROBLEMS (VERSE 2)

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  1. This is based on a true story, but ultimately it’s fictional. Our hero here is riding dirty, road-tripping down the turnpike from somewhere farther north, which is how things worked back in the eighties and early nineties. New York guys had better connects and opened up drug markets down the I-95 corridor. It was one of the factors that made coke money so thick in New York during that period, and the competition turned the game bloody from Brooklyn to Baltimore to D.C. to the Carolinas.

  2. The car might’ve been a Maxima, which were big on the streets in ’94. In the real-life version of this story, the trunk wasn’t raw, it was a compartment in the sunroof that doubled as a “stash.”

  3. Jake is one of a million words for the boys in blue, but it’s particularly dismissive and used mostly in New York, so it works as a way of establishing the character of the narrator. He’s a slick New York kid.

  4. “Driving while black” was usually a sufficient reason for the police to stop us. The first offense wasn’t the crack in the ride but the color of the driver.

  5. When we did work out of state, we would have everything planned down to the finest detail—but then get caught by a cop for no good reason, like “driving fifty-five in a fifty-four.” Of course, the sarcasm in the speed limit being fifty-four is another way of saying that we’re being pulled over for no good reason.

  6. “A lot of you are” is another statement with racial undertones that he and I are both aware of.

  7. This dialogue is about the tension between a cop who knows that legally he’s dead wrong for stopping someone with no probable cause other than race, and a narrator who knows that legally he’s dead wrong for moving the crack. But legality aside, they both think they’re justified—and the fact is they’re both used to getting away with it. So they’re playing this cat-and-mouse game, taking sarcastic shots at each other, arguing over the law. The confrontation is casual and consequential all at once and shows how slippery language is, depending on which side of the conversation you’re on.

  8. In every verse of the song I use the word “bitch” in a different way. In this verse, the bitch is a female dog, the K-9 cop coming to sniff the ride. When I was living my version of this story, we got away—the K-9 was late, and the cop let me go. We were back on the road again, hearts pounding, crack still tucked untouched in the stash, when I saw the K-9 unit screaming up the highway, going in the opposite direction. It would’ve changed my life if that dog had been a few seconds faster. We had a strange kind of luck, some kind of rogue angel watching over us. But in the song I left the outcome ambiguous—does he get away or not? That’s the writer in me. I like ambiguous endings, like Shane staggering off into the sunset at the end of the movie. Does he die or does he live? And the larger question: Should he die or live? I leave it to the listener to decide.

  IGNORANT SHIT / FEATURING BEANIE SIGEL

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  1. This is a slight exaggeration.

  2. In the opening four lines of the song, I made sure to include the big four “ignorant” subjects: chicks taking off their clothes, guns popping, drugs getting sold, and spending money. The rest of the song follows from there.

  3. The first block is a block of coke; the second is the actual city block.

  4. The television show CHiPs ran from 1977 to 1983. Truthfully, I wasn’t doing this since I was eight, but close.

  5. There are a lot of motel references in my songs. Motels are where a lot of our work got done, where we bagged our powder.

  6. In Spike Lee’s movie, the 25th hour was the moment right before the main character went to prison. Every hour is the 25th hour when you’re on the streets; it can end at any moment.

  7. “Spike Lees” are slang for the best seats in the house—in this case, whether it’s at the arena or in the jet.

  8. Sprewells are custom rims that have an internal disk that spins when the car stops, named after Latrell Sprewell, who started selling them in his custom shop. Fun for kids, but for grown-ups, a sign that you might be trying too hard.

  9. A satisfying list of ignorant words—childish and adult at the same time, like a rapper with Tourette’s.

  10. A bilingual list of ignorant words, just to make sure everyone’s included.

  11. When I say that rappers are actors, I mean it in two ways: First, a lot of them are pretending to be something they’re not outside the booth; second, it also means that even rappers who are being real often use a core reality as the basis for a great fantasy, the way a great method actor like DeNiro does.

  12. They’re standing in the “mirror backwards” because they can’t face themselves. No matter how convincing you are to the rest of the world, you still know the truth, and in a private moment it shames you enough to turn away from your own reflection. I bring back the idea a few lines later, when I say that what they’re saying in their rhymes is as backward as their posture in the mirror.

  13. This Marvin Gaye reference also makes the point that even an honest rapper has the liberty to make things up, because it’s entertainment.

  14. The concept of this song was a license to go completely over the top. But there’s a serious point in the end.

  15. Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a “bunch of nappy-headed hoes,” and the debate over his dismissal somehow got turned into a debate about the language used
in rap.

  16. We give violent movies a pass but come down hard on a rapper like Scarface, who is ultimately a storyteller just like Brian de Palma. And neither of them is responsible for the poverty and violence that really do shape people’s lives—not to mention their individual choices.

  MOST KINGS

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  1. This is no shot at Big or Pac. The truth is that you can’t compare us; Big only did two albums before he was killed, and Pac was still going through metamorphosis; who knows where he would’ve ended up. So when people make the comparison—as they always do—they’re comparing my work not just with the work of Big and Pac, but with what they could’ve been—should’ve been—and what their lives and deaths represented to the entire culture. Their shadows still loom over all of us who were their peers.