You hear it all the time from some people. If you’re not a certain skin complexion—going back to the complexion verse—if you don’t look exotic, if you don’t look like you’re mixed with something, if you’re dark skin, if your hair isn’t silky and down your back, you’re not beautiful. You’re not sexy. You’re not appealing to the eye. That’s a trip to me. It’s just as straight forward as that. The idea of what beauty is and how black women—especially darker skin black women—and black women who have beautiful thicker hair are not put in that equation. They’re not thought of as beautiful. They’re not sought after. They’re not your dream girls. But at the same time, everyone wants to look like them. They want the thick lips. They want the thick butts. So yeah, that’s what that is.

On the flip side, I am a black woman and I live in this world. And I know how the world looks at us. We’re not beautiful. We’re the lowest of the lowest. Not only are we black, but we’re women at that. Just having to feel like you always have to have it together. You have to have your man’s back when he’s breaking down from the world, you gotta be there to clean all that up. It’s like, “Well, if the world is treating me like this and my man has all this on his shoulders, I gotta hold him up, who’s holding me up?” And that’s what makes women so strong. I gotta make sure I have his back. I got this world to deal with and I gotta raise these children. And that’s just some of the stresses and the pain that women go through in life. Just having to deal with that and how strong women mentally are for that reason.

As an MC, I gotta throw some word play on there. Even when it’s a real direct subject matter, but I was just playing on the fact that sometimes guys need to step back and have a breather. The world gets so heavy, and it’s so tight, and it feels like you can’t breathe. Your chest is tight. You’re carrying the world on your shoulders. But they don’t grab asthma pumps, sometimes they grab guns and they go out into the world. “I’m gonna get my respect through this gun. I’m gonna take my breath and exhale through this gun. I’m gonna take all my frustration out through this gun.” People take the power from here, and they put all the power in the gun. “Now you’re gonna respect me.” It’s a cycle. Everything is a cycle. Everything is connected in some kind of way. I could have connected it back to slavery if I wanted to.

I grew up around a lot of guys. I hang around a lot of guys. I hear what guys talk about, and I hear what’s painful for them and what hurts their feelings. You know, as men, you’re not supposed to show emotions, and when you had a long day and the world is beating up on you as a black man, you’re not supposed to cry and let that out. But it’s hard to carry when you come to the house and you can’t even have peace sometimes and get that respect in your own home. And what that does to men. It’s not meant to be, “Women are just supposed to be submissive to men,” but at the same time, I think we as women need to step back sometimes and understand how hard it is to be a black man in America. It’s really tough. And how much they hold. To be the head of the house and to feel like, “This is somewhere where I can be a man. Don’t take that from me. Because this is all I got. There’s nobody above me telling me what I can or cannot do. I could really be the man and the king of my house and take care of my family. Don’t strip me of that. Don’t talk down on me. Don’t disrespect me.” So, that was just me telling us women, “Let’s not forget that.” That they carry a lot. And sometimes we might want this done or that done, but we gotta look like, “Yo, the world is hard, he might have had a bad day. Let me just chill.” You know?

Somewhere along the lines, it became uncool to not only be smart, but to be proud of where you come from. To be proud of your culture. To call yourself a king or a queen. I remember growing up, that was the lingo. Now if you have any music where you got king or queen in it, you’re conscious. At what point in time did it become not cool to think of yourself as a king or a queen. I just thought that was weird. Who planted that seed in you? Who messed up your self-esteem. For somebody to call you king or queen and you associate that with, “Oh that’s what smart people say.” Why is that a bad thing? Why don’t you want to be smart? Why do you think it’s cool to be stupid? And I definitely think there’s a reason for that. People know the power of music and the power of words and what that could do for you. I just had to speak on that. I wanted people to sit back and ask themselves, “Why is that not cool? What’s wrong with that?” I remember back in the day listening to the music, whether they were you boxed them in like super Nas or a Talib Kweli or Mos Def. If you have somebody on the corner doing what he do, they would all call each other king or queens, at the end of the day. And nobody was like, “Oh, you’re too smart to be that.” I could remember Busta Rhymes telling me a story. “The gods on the corner were super intelligent. Some of the smartest people you would know! I remember coming from out the store playing video games and they were giving me knowledge. Young boy don’t come over here, you need to learn this. Do you know about that? What’s up young king.” And these are the hardest boys on the block. Nowadays, the hardest dudes on the block are not supposed to know that. They’re not supposed to give knowledge. So where did that change and why did that change and who put that seed and who did that? Who wanted us to make that turn and made us not have that positivity in our music?

That just touches on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. It’s like, whether they’re scared of us or they’re racist, they don’t respect our lives. It’s over that quickly. But we turn around, whether it’s over colors or over ego or that guy got at your girl and you’re feeling some kind of way, you do the same thing. And it’s like, they’re two separate things. I don’t want it to be like I can’t talk about police brutality because black men kill each other. But at the same time, it’s like, “Yo! We can’t do that to each other either.” They’re already killing us. We’re gonna get it from both ends? That was just the idea of it and how that’s painful to watch.

Man, that first verse. People talk about black-on-black crime, and I don’t want to label it as that because black-and-black crime, white-on-black crime, the statistics show there’s no such thing as black-on-black crime. White-on-white crime. We’re around each other. The people are around each other and we kill each other. But regardless of what, it’s just like, “Why do we do that?’ We all fight the same fight. Like, ‘That’s crazy.” What makes you a man are these! You get out the way but you live to fight another day. It comes from a funny movie, Friday, but that’s some of the realest shit ever. You live to fight another day. You might beat me today, but I might have a chance to get you again and we all good. This when you come out and take somebody’s life over sneakers? Or because you felt disrespected and you got an ego? You can’t make that right again. And this is like, your brother! This is somebody who’s got the same fight as you as a black man, especially. So I just wanted to put that into perspective. Step back and see what you’re doing to each other.

Having funny paper means you don’t have as much money as someone claims to have, thus using it as a simile with The Funny Pages in the newspapers that always come out on Sunday.