Roots is a highly acclaimed 70’s mini-series that focuses on the beginning and end of the transatlantic slave trade. In what is perhaps the series’s most well known scene, focal character Kunta Kinte is whipped into submission, being forced to accept his new Americanized name of “Toby.”

Awakening “mentally dead” people is what the Gravediggaz strive to do with their music as well as the origin of their names, as explained on a previous song on the album, “Twelve Jewelz”:

As long as you got mentally dead people
Who are living in a mental death
Meaning living in a mental grave
You need somebody to dig that grave up and bring them back to life
There’s no chance for a physical dead
But there’s chance for the mentally dead
(Yo, one two one two two)
So we gonna come and resurrect them
That’s why they call me the Rzarector
I’m out to resurrect the mental dead, by diggin up they graves
Bringin em back to the surface

Aleem assigning Poetic (the Grym Reaper) this “mission” is the Gravediggaz way of telling him to spit knowledge.

Slug is often viewed by casual fans and critics as having all of his song content revolve around women, love, and relationships (or lack thereof). While of course this is not all of his subject matter, this statement does take credence in some of Atmosphere’s most well known songs such as “Fuck You Lucy,” “Modern Man’s Hustle,” and “The Woman With the Tattooed Hands.”

Slug is aware of this belief that people have of him and his music and has addressed it multiple times, such as on 2002’s “Bass and the Movement.”

Yo, you heard Slug sing his songs about women
Like he must be a weakling, I know I can fuck with him

Q and his crew aren’t messing around when they pull out their guns, they aren’t fake gangsters who carry pieces for show.

Horseplay/quick draw is a reference to the 1960’s cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw, an anthropomorphic gun-slinging horse who was a sheriff in the Old West