The reference here concerns a conspiracy theory that views Ronald Reagan as the Antichrist, or the Devil; one of the proofs for this is found in the number of letters in each of his names: Ronald Wilson Reagan, 6-6-6.

This is probably also a humorous reference to the TV show "The Boondocks" where the protagonist Huey Freeman calls Ronald Reagan "the Devil" in a list of the truths he wants to reveal to the public during a dream. The Boondocks, Season 1, Party Scene

Killer Mike decides to close his song with a harsh statement about Ronald Reagan that suggests how Reagan and his legacy make him feel. Moreover, Reagan becomes the symbol of a system designed to undermine the possibilities of Killer Mike's community and ended up putting their life in extreme difficulties and danger. This is the same system Michelle Alexander refers to in her book, "The New Jim Crow".

In his interview with Luke McCormick for Spin Magazine in 2012, Killer Mike states:

Under Reagan, drugs were allowed to flood our community and wipe out two to three generations of people that could have kept my community growing and I take exception to that. I threw a BBQ when Reagan died. It’s not a vehement hate though, I’m not gonna spit on his grave. I wanted to break down what the Reagan era was really like.

Killer Mike sums up what he thinks is the real American character with his final statement on politics:

They only love the rich and how they loathe the poor.

He then proceeds to imagine being surveilled, with his window being stared of, just us many Civil Rights activist were during the era of COINTELPRO, the program adopted by the FBI to surveil Black activists and the Black Panther Party from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Moving from the theme of equality in the United States to its foreign policy, Killer Mike directly accuses the Presidents of the United States, from Reagan to Obama, of being actors and puppets of the country real masters.

His argument in support of this is the common political position shared by presidents on opposite sides of the political spectrum, such as Reagan and Obama, toward North Africa and the Middle East, and especially Gaddafi.

Gaddafi was the authoritarian leader of Lybia for 42 years, from 1969 to 2011, and was bombed by the United States both in 1986 and in 2011 in attempts to kill him, with the latter being succesful.

In his arguments against U.S. foreing policy, he also refers to the wars in the Middle East. He argues that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2000s and 2010s were actually motivated by a colonial quest for oil and natural resources, adding how Ahmadinejad, then the 6th President of Iran, warned that they coming for Iran.

In his second verse, Killer Mike essentially exposes the same theory as Michelle Alexander in "The New Jim Crow". According to him, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror were instruments to control the population and let the police terrorize whoever.

The main targets, though, were Black boys, many of whom ended up as victims of police brutality or, in the worst case, as "new slaves" in the prison system boosted by Reaganomics. Under Reagan, in fact, many prisons ended up privatized and became a profitable business; and, according to the 13th Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

In the words of Killer Mike, this is the reason why they givin' drug offenders time in double digits. Harsh punishments for drug trafficking and possession, allow the 13th Amendment to become a way to enfroce a new form of slavery through mass incarceration, of which, Black boys are the main and disproportionate targets.

In the America that Killer Mike and Alexander are painting, equality is prevented at every turn by a system designed to keep a racial caste order in place while, at the same time, profiting from it in an indirect and subtle way.

Killer Mike uses another sample from President Ronald Reagan’s speech from the Oval Office on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy, March 4, 1987.

In this clip, Reagan is forced to retract the words he had spoken four months earlier and admit that, in fact, he did trade arms for hostages with Iran.

In this way, Killer Mike and El-P (the producer) are presenting a negative image of Ronald Reagan, a president often revered and considered an icon, through his own words, showing an example of him being exposed as a liar.

In these lines, Killer Mike is explicitly critical of American rappers.

According to him, rappers are guilty of offering the youth only some ballin' and some dancin', and hand the children that and pretend that it's exiciting.

This refers to themes of gang violence, drug consumption, and drug dealing, typically associated with the" rags to riches" narrative in rap songs. Many mainstream rap songs have been criticized, not only by Killer Mike, for ending up as advertisments for violence rather than as artistic expressions from a specific underprivileged contexts.

Connecting this theme to American foreign politicy, he compares these rappers to Military Officer Oliver North, protagonist of the "Iran-Contra Scandal".

A popular conspiracy theory argues that the Contras exported cocaine to the United States with the implicit permission or direct assistance of the U.S. government, which could be one of the reasons for the cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. According to this theory, this cocaine ended up mainly in the United States ghettos, devastating the African-American community.

Killer Mike underlines the importance of owning property for African-Americans as a means of obtaining freedom and self-reliance as a community. He appears to be critical of his own community, asking if, Will we ever do it big or just keep settling for lil’shit? He argues that "having bread", meaning being rich, is not really something to brag about if you are not "a baker"; that is to say, if you do not own the means of generating wealth in the first place.

Killer Mike starts his first verse with a direct reference to the African-American activist Malcolm X.

"The Ballot or the Bullet" is the title of a famous speech delivered by Malcolm X in 1964, encouraging the African-American community to take decisive action in order to secure their right to vote.

The intro is a sample from President Ronald Reagan’s Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy – November 13, 1986.

In this sample, President Ronald Reagan denies what would later be called "Irangate" or "Iran-Contra Scandal", in which the United States governement was found to be secretly selling weapons to Iran (which was under an arms embargo) in order to secure the release of American hostages. The profits were illegally used to fund to the Contras, a rebel group in Nicaragua, despite a direct ban from Congress.

J. Cole, here, is precisely alluding to the "Possessive Investment in Whiteness" that George Lipsitz wrote about.

The tax dollars that he pays, supposedly to build roads and schools, do not actually end up being invested in helping his community.

J. Cole, in fact, presents the idea that young African-Americans often lack the tools to take advantage of the educational system. He shows how the government's act of hirin' some teachers that don't look like them, meaning white teachers with a different cultural and economic background, does not help them understand the value of education or motivate them to trust in the institution of schooling.

In this tragic story that J. Cole tells so masterfully in a few lines, he imagines how the money he pays in taxes ends up with one of the companies manufacturing weapons and bullets in the United States, which often heavily finance the Republicans.

One of these bullets made with his money ends up in his neighborhood, killing one of the two sons of a single mother. The boy that was doing good at the white man schools ends up incidentally killed by a stray bullet; the other one is lost in the streets all day, not using rubbers (condoms) so he is next in line to be a father of two.

This tragic example serves to demonstrate how the "Possessive Investment in Whiteness" could work against a single mother's family in the hood. It shows the irony and contradictions in J. Cole ironically paying taxes without an equal representation of his people in the land that made "no taxation without representation" one of its first mottoes.

Brackets shows how racism works in its systemic nature, and how it can deeply affect society in ways that are not always so explicit and clear to see. In this regard, it seems a perfect artistic rendition of the meaning of Lipsitz's essay.

In these lines, J. Cole is expressing his discontent with the way American democracy actually works; he argues for a chance to better decide where and how the money coming from his taxes is invested.

He then proceeds to explain why by narrating the story of a single mother of two.

Expanding on the concept of the lack of appeal of school for young African-Americans, J. Cole discusses the nature of the curriculum and the canon here.

According to Cole, schools make their young Black students learn about the heroes with the whitest of skin, alluding to the Eurocentricism of the traditional literary and historical canon common throughout the Western world.

He then reflects on this selective view of history and how it is continually ongoing; he asks himself if we'll never see a black man in the White House again, pointing out the power the concept of whiteness still holds nowadays.

In this interlude, J. Cole uses his alter ego "Kill Edward" (often reffered to as a younger version of himself). "Kill Edward" is initially ready to give his check to the American government (Unc' Sam) with a good spirits, but reacts harshly when he realizes that Uncle Sam is asking him for half of his earnings.

"Kill Edward" hanging up the phone and insulting "Uncle Sam" serves as an introduction to a long reflection by J. Cole on taxes and government spending in the third verse.

In the first brief verse, Cole starts by talking about an upcoming rapper trying to use his name to crate viral content and gain more visibility.

He describes himself as unbothered by it and focused mainly on watch[ing] his paper stack. However, he introduces the main theme of the song with his final line:

And trip off how much bread them crackers take from that.

"Bread", here, means money, and "crackers" is a derogatory term for white people which, in this case, refers mainly to the government taking his money away through taxes.

The intro is a sample from comedian Richard Pryor’s stand-up routine “Fame”, part of "That African American Is Still Crazy: Good Shit From The Vaults", which features material from the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

Richard Pryor is one of the most important African-American comedians of all time, active from the 1960s until the 1990s.

In this skit, part of his stand-up routine "Fame", he jokes about how rich he is and how his own father could not even believe the amount of money he makes.

Joe Louis was a professional boxer and the World Heavyweight Champion from 1937 to 1949.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the federal agency of the United States government responsible for tax collection.

In the chorus, which also opens the song, Jay-Z demonstrates his disillusion with equality. He argues that, no matter the level of status or celebrity a man or woman achieves in the United States, they will still be primarily judged by their race and marginalized.

In referring to the distinction between the "house nigga" and the "field nigga", he is quoting a speech delivered in 1965 by Malcolm X in Selma, Alabama, while Martin Luther King Jr. was being held in jail after his famous march on Selma:

Back during slavery (...) there were two kinds of Negroes. The house Negro always looked out for his master (...) But then you had some field Negroes (...)They hated their master.

In his disillusionmenr, his point of view is very different from that of Booker T. Washington, as he does not believe that elevating one's status actually shields them from racism.

In the second verse, the rapper expands on the concept of developing wealth and obtaining financial freedom, which he defines as his only hope.

He also makes reference to his streaming platform, Tidal, which offers a million dollars worth of game through its music catalog for $9.99 a month. Tidal is just one of the many business ventures of the rapper.

In the closing lines, he mocks rappers who take "advances" - a form of loan that record labels offer to artists to finance their albums - and also the trend followed by some rappers on Instagram of showing off money by holding it close to their ears. He reveals, with a clever play on words, that there's a disconnect, we don't call that money over here.

In this song, Jay-Z is constantly pointing out at the importance of property and wealth. He is, therefore, to be considered a Black capitalist. He shows how he strongly believes in economic success as the principal means reaching some form of equality or, at least, some form of upliftment.

However, he does not really believe that wealth and status can be a proper shield from racism; thus, wealth is only a way to obtain a very partial equality.

Insisting on the concepts of maintaining and acquiring wealth, Jay-Z refers here to the common stereotype about Jewish people in America and their wealth.

He uses this stereotype to be critical of the consumerism and materialism of a part of his own community, symbolized by the act of spending a lot of money in strip clubs. Instead of this, he is suggesting once again reaching empowerment through the acquisition of wealth, a solution that puts his ideas close to those of Booker T. Washington.

DUMBO stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that acquired immense value due to gentrification. Playing with the words "DUMBO" and "dumb", he is explaining how he regrets not having invested in the said neighborhood despite being able to.

Jay-Z in this first verse is strongly underlining how much he considers acquiring property to be fundamental, as a mean of upliftment, for African-Americans.

In these lines, Jay-Z wishes he could actually have followed the same advice he is giving in the lines before, confessing that he should have invested in real estate the money he instead wasted on luxury cars.

A V12 Engine is a twelve-cylinder engine found in the most expensive cars.

Imagining himself talking to a young drug dealer hustling at the corners of his neighborhood, Jay-Z is basically suggesting him to be wise with his money and reinvest it in buying property in his surroundings, not only to ensure himself generational wealth, but also to give himself the chance to abandon the street life and the dangers associated with it.

Jay-Z starts his first verse by remembering once again the difference between the "house nigga" and the "field nigga".

During slavery, slaves working inside the master's house often developed a better relationship with him and, consequently, gained certain privileges they would often protect by perpetuating and favoring the mechanisms of slavery. Slaves working in the fields, on the contrary, had no kind of pleasant relationship with their masters and hated them, planning, when possible, to escape.

Jay-Z distances himself from the concept of the "house nigga", saying he cannot be found in gold-plated quarters, where the butlers be but on the corners where the hustlers be, referring to drug dealing on street corners.

In "Four Women", Nina Simone explores the lives of four different archetypes of African-American women to narrate their suffering and their struggle for identity.

In the outro, Carl finishes explaining his beliefs to Kendrick and the reason why he thinks the young rapper has a chip on his shoulders. He warns Kendrick and African-American community to go back to these commandments.

He defines the so-called Black, Hispanic and Native American Indians as the true children of Israel exactly like the Puritans felt they were the people of Israel looking to find a New Jerusalem. Carl also associates the struggles of these minorities with their distance from God, suggesting a return to the word of God as the only salvation from the curses of these people.

Shalom means "Hello" or "Peace" in Hebrew, and this greeting closes Carl's discourse and the whole song.

In the third verse, Kendrick talks directly to the listener without using any poetic devices. At 27 years old, he declares that his fears have "accumulated 10 times over over the years". Fear now assumes the form of failure, mainly of losing everything he has beem able to achieve and acquire.

In the lines:

All this money, is God playin’ a joke on me? Is it for the moment and will he see me as Job?" Take it from me and leave me worse than I was before?

His fears become biblical once again: Job was a rich and righteous man, but God tested him by taking away his family and wealth and inflicting painful diseases upon him. Job accepted being tested without protests, and his wealth was later restored.

At 17 years old, fear assumes the form of death for Kendrick. The violent and dangerous life of a teenager in Compton is constatly threatened by gang violence, police brutality, and drug addicts.

This sensation of doom is rendered perfectly in the closing lines:

I’ll prolly die ’cause that’s what you do when you’re 17 All worries in a hurry, I wish I controlled things.

A sense of impotence and a lack of agency in a dangerous environment seem to be the reasons for the constant fear of the 17 year old, an environment metaphorically wild, reminiscent of the wilderness of the Puritans, which they called the "American Desart".

To close the verse, Kendrick continues listing his fears and the feelings he has toward them. Central to my thesis, though, is the line:

I’m talkin’ fear, fear of losin’ loyalty from pride ‘Cause my DNA won’t let me involve in the light of God

Kendrick, in fact, identifies the source of his damnation here: his DNA. In this way, he connects with the Hebrew Israelites. Damnation is a legacy of his ancestors, and he fully acknowledges it in these lines.

This tale of damnation and the search of redemption is a practical total reverse of the Puritan rethoric in the first place.

Fear assumes another connotation here, indicating the relation between Kendrick and his community. Reputation is one thing he is still afraid of, even after running away from fear for years.

In 2015, Rihanna’s accountant was declared missing after she sued him for a series of bad advice that lost her $9 million in a year. In these lines, Kendrick contemplates another way in which he could lose his money and wonders how he would feel if he were robbed of his money, of which he is so vigilant.

Kendrick describes the fear of losing everything he has as being so crippling that he is scared to spend any money at all. The haunting memory of Section 8 Housing is so persistent that despite working hard for his money, he [...] still won't buy me no Lexus. Writing this verse, the 27-year-old Kendrick had already earned more than 30 million dollars in his career.

The first verse is written from the perspective of Lamar's mom, dealing with a 7 year old Kendrick. The biggest fear of the kid is being whooped by his mother, that is constantly threatening him in order to teach the boy discipline.

The scenario Kendrick is depicting is also meant to represent the life of many poor African-Americans as the line County's building on my ass, tryna take my food stamps away is underlying. The Food Stamp Program is a program that provides food to low-income families.

Also, the line I beat yo' ass if you tell them social workers he live here is a reference to the “man in the house” rule, where welfare benefits would be denied to a family if a man resided in the house. Kendrick's mom is alluding to this rule.

The closing line gives the idea of how Kendrick's mom is determined to be the first reason of fear for the boy, and although it is for the reason for his own protection, this same sensation of fear will never leave him and will take more complex forms.

In the chorus, which shifts the narrative from age 7 to 17, Kendrick imagines smoking fear away, as an act of liberation from the constant sense of fear that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Kendrick, here, is calling out to God, asking him the reason for his pain. In these verses, the feeling of being damned is underlined, as he suffers a pain whose cause he really does not know. This bridge is anticipating the answer his cousin Carl will give him in the end of the song: the cause of this suffering lies in the distance from God. The Christian rhetoric employed in this part of the song exposes a relation of damnation and salvation very similar to the one of the Puritans.

Kendrick's cousin, Carl Duckworth, considers himself a Hebrew Israelite. "Hebrew Israelites are people of color, mostly African Americans, who view the biblical Israelites as their historical ancestors. For Hebrew Israelites, the transatlantic slave trade was foretold in scripture and they understand those Africans who were enslaved in the Americas as Israelites, severed from their heritage." Hebrew Israelites

In the song's introduction, Carl's message gives an initial sense of despair and damnation to the song, in biblical terms, until he is interrupted by Kendrick calling out to God.

This is a sample of The 24-Carat Black’s 1973 ballad, “Poverty’s Paradise.”

In the closing lines of the third verse, Nas is expressing his hope for the future, in which he envisions the possibility of ghetto children changing the world.

Nas is arguing for the freedom of the African-American people from the darker aspects of their history, by remembering their forgotten one. In doing so, even their future can shine brightly through the means of education and ambition to reclaim control of their life.

In the third verse, the rapper attemps to reverse the traditionally racist view of Africans as savages and, essentially, a race without a history or culture of its own.

In doing this, he makes reference to the most powerful African empires: the Empire of the Black Pharaohs of Kush in Egypt, and the city of Timbuktu in the Mali Empire, where the University of Sankoré hosted over 25,000 students in the 14th and 15th centuries.

This Afrocentric view that Nas is providing is intended to give young Arican-Americans a different perspective on themselves than the one they may encounter through explicit or institutional racism in their lives. Giving boys a past they can be proud of, instead of one they might be ashamed of, is fundamental to creating a better self-consciousness.

In these lines, Nas is addressing young boys, advocating for the worth of having an education and building an economically and emotionally independent future for themselves.

Through all the second verse, Nas is trying to propose a vision of themselves clear of the ambiguities of "Double Consciousness", trying to motivate the youth to express their full potential, as an older brother would do.

Nas is once again talking to black girls and warning them about the danger that men can represent to girls at a young age.

Oprah Winfrey is a TV host and cultural icon, considered one of the most influential women in the U.S. recent history.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the HIV epidemic reached the point of being a full-scale public health emergency that devastated African-American communities.

Nas warnsw that meeting a man with HIV is one of the consequences of the media-induced tendency of pretending to be older than you are.

Nas's advice to young girls aspiring to be stars is to watch the company they choose for themselves and stay away from destructive drugs like cocaine and heroin.

Legendary artists like James Brown and Whitney Houston are examples of black celebrities who had complex relationships with drugs, with the latter having her life deeply troubled by addiction.

Nas, here, is subtly fighting against the stereotypes often attributed to young African-Americans living in the ghetto, according to which the only way for them to achieve success is by becoming rappers or basketball players. Instead, Nas is deliberately alluding to other professional paths here.

The song is introduced by a children's choir singing what is the chorus of the song but, also, its main theme: working hard enough, everything can be achieved. This idea is an embodiment of the American Dream that, even despite the harsh conditions he was born in, Nas was able to realize. In the following verses, though, Nas seems to be mainly directing his message to Black boys and girls, trying to give them advice and a general sense of empowerment and self-confidence.

Nas, here, is trying to give a proper self-consciousness to his Black listeners, the same self-consciousness Du Bois argued was missing from the African-Americans' self-perspective.

Lena Horne was a African-American actress, singer and activist famous in the 1950's.

"In God We Trust" is one of the mottoes of the United States, featured on coins and dollars.

Here, again, Nas is referring to the American Mythology and imaginery but, in doing so, is talking specifically to black boys and girls.