While MCs like Lil Wayne have claimed to be the best rapper alive, Kanye takes it one step further and claims to be the best rapper of all time, dead or alive.

The second part of this couplet is very similar to Big Sean’s lyric on his song “Made,” which Kanye produced:

I need less friends, more bread
Less talk, more head

The song was released two months before “Monster.”

The wordplay/transition from the hook: “I’m-a need to see your fucking hands at the concert” into “The best living or dead hands down, huh” could be intentional or coincidence.

Red eyes are often associated with evil, hence the used of the devil in the simile of the first line.

In a collaboration with Mic, Genius found MBDTF to be Kanye’s darkest album. He makes further references to the devil on “Devil In A New Dress” and “See Me Now.”

Since she’s the “head” (top) of the class, she just won a “swallowship” (swallow+ scholarship) to help pay her ‘education.’ Also, “head” is a term for oral sex.

Kanye is parodying/living up to the common hip hop trope of buying a large chain. His massive 24K Horus head chain allegedly cost him $300,000. Certainly looks like it would cause back pain…

Kanye later released a song called “Chain Heavy.”

In basketball, a triple double refers to achieving double digit numbers in three of the following categories: scoring, rebounds, blocked shots, steals, and assists.

Kanye writes, raps, and produces his own tracks. Whereas typically a hip hop artist either produces records or raps, Ye doesn’t need assistance since he can take a track from concept to completion by himself (doing both the rapping and producing).

This seems somewhat hypocritical, considering 26 writers and 12 producers worked on this album.

Kanye playing basketball in Hawaii during the recording of MBDTF.

Cube sticks with the same metaphor present throughout the song—that in giving himself a bigger slice of the financial pie than the rest of the group, Eazy was screwing his friends out of what they rightfully earned.

Eazy stood at 5'3". Although he never hid from this, even making a song called “Niggaz My Height Don’t Fight.”

This is a reference to N.W.A member MC Ren (a.k.a The Ruthless Villain, The Villain, The Villain in Black, Rebel Villain), who was well known for rocking a black Oakland Raiders cap. The name “The Villain” comes from the first track Ren penned for Eazy-E, titled “Ruthless Villain.”

MC Ren is pictured far right.

The term “the bigger the cap the bigger the peeling” is reminiscent of Parliament’s “They say the bigger the headache, the bigger the pill” on “Dr. Funkenstein” and was originally used by Cube on “Steady Mobbin',” another song from this album.

This line uses imagery to describe flesh peeling from someone’s head (likely Ren’s) as a result of a gun shot wound.