Since this is on the 10th anniversary for Illmatic, he took one of his old verses that he wrote from the original “On the Real” that features Screwball and Cormega that came out in 1995.

They released Illmatic earlier because it was heavily bootlegged. Nas wrote that verse 10 years ago and it´s still ill, they are classics/timeless!

This album version served as a hype/promo for his next original album: Street´s Disciple to show that he´s still Nasty/stillmatic. He even used one of his alias back in the day and rhymes as the title of it.

Street’s disciple, my raps are trifle
I shoot slugs from my brain just like a rifle

Monkey see monkey do is an expression describing someone who imitates another person’s actions, good or bad, simply by having watched them before. So he could be saying that that kid imitates the old by sipping Sunny D to be cool.

It could also be that other rappers imitates Nas, something he attacked Jay Z on “Last Real Nigga Alive” for instance.

Now the progression in the next line turns into hard liquor. Note the consonance on the letter M and S: Money — Monkey, Shorty — Sipping — Sunny. Making some cool internal rhymes.

Nas is known as one of if not the best and most creative storyteller: See Undying Love, Rewind, Last Real Nigga Alive and universally acclaimed as one of the best rap songs of all time: NY State of Mind.

Writer Adam Bradley states in the book Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, “Nas is perhaps contemporary rap’s greatest innovator in storytelling. His catalog includes songs narrated before birth (Fetus) and after death (Amongst Kings), biographies (‘UBR: Unauthorized Biography of Rakim) and autobiographies (Doo Rags), allegorical tales (Money Is My Bitch) and epistolary ones (One Love), he’s rapped in the voice of a woman (Sekou Story) and even of a gun (I Gave You Power).”

But this record is for his sequel, the 10th year anniversary of Illmatic. You see the similar vocabulary and themes to Illmatic: Being in the hood striving for money to get out of “hell”, smoking blunts because life´s a bitch and broken gun.

Note that he starts a series of masterful consonance on the letter B: Breed – Blue – Blunts – Broken and in the next lines M and S: Money – Monkey, Shorty – Sipping – Sunny.

History repeat itself.

Modernism has brought about the same things -> Prisoners are the new slaves, instead of taking them from africa like during the colonialsm.

Intrestingly enough and what probably inspired this line (maybe the whole song) was that Lauryn herself was sentenced to prison – On May 6, 2013, Hill was sentenced by Judge Arleo to serve in prison for three months for tax evasion and will face three months house arrest afterwards as part of a year of supervised probation.

The sentence given took into account her lack of a prior criminal record and her six minor-aged children. By this point Hill had fully paid back $970,000 in back taxes and penalties she owed, which also took into account an additional $500,000 that Hill had in unreported income for 2008 and 2009.

In the courtroom, Hill said that she had lived “very modestly” considering how much money she had made for others, and that “I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them. I had an economic system imposed on me.” This song was also supposed to be released during her imprisoment.

Joseph McCarthy was a Republican senator who went on a witch hunt to expose communists in America; we as a nation go on these with hunts as well. Colonialisms is likely a reference to the McCarthy line, because McCarthyism is very similar to the Salem Witch Trials.

Colonialism is the idea that colonization of indigenous peoples by colonizers (traditionally European ones) has repeatedly resulted in extinction, extermination, and suppression of those cultures. Lauryn Hill knows that– the “new colonialisms” are both the American obsession with getting involved in other countries' shit, and the upper- and middle-class white American obsessions with their misconceptions of “black culture” (“ethnoplagiarism”)– which is itself leading genuine black culture to be swept aside in pursuit of this more marketable false one. Consumerism.