This verse lays out, in order, all of the mathematical attributes of the NGE’s Supreme Mathematics. The words that correspond to the numbers 1-9, followed by 0, occur in order in the verse:

1 – Knowledge
2 – Wisdom
3 – Understanding
4 – Culture/Freedom
5 – Power/Refinement
6 – Equality
7 – God
8 – Build/Destroy
9 – Born
0 – Cipher

This is taken verbatim from the first question of Lost-Found Muslim Lesson No. 2, part of the 120 Lessons used by the 5% Nation:

1. Who made the Holy Quran or Bible? How long ago And why does Islam renew its history every 25,000 years

Ans. The Holy Quran or Bible was made by the original man, who is Allah, the supreme being, blackman of Asia. The Quran will expire in the year 25,000. 9,080 years from the date of this writing. The Nation of Islam is all wise and does everything right and exact. The planet Earth which is the home of Islam is approximately 25,000 miles in circumference, so the Wiseman of the East (Blackman) makes his history to equal his home circumference, a year to every mile. Thus every time his history lasts for 25,000 years he renews it for another 25,000 years.

Knight again:

In Yacub’s eugenics law, nurses were ordered to kill black babies by sticking needles in their brains. The phrase “pins and needles” occurs frequently in Five Percenter discourse, referring to negative mental states brought on by the harmful messages in American culture

Michael Muhammad Knight broke down these lines in his superb book about the 5% Nation:

The 120 [Lessons] states that Africans who had been kidnapped and taken to North America “wanted to go to their own country, but they could not swim nine thousand miles.” And after Yacub created white devils, they were exiled to the caves of Europe; thus, a black man who is forced to conform to White America and its culture lives like a “modern-day Flintstone.”

Vega:

The part where I sing about the “midnight picnic” is from an actual picnic I had with the songwriter Jack Hardy on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine one night.

via

Vega:

I have a photographer friend, Brian Rose, who has taken pictures of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Berlin Wall. He told me once long ago that he felt as though he saw the world through a pane of glass. This struck me as romantic and alienated, and I wanted to write a song from this viewpoint.

– via The New York Times