A sympathetic but complicated portrayal of the titular Billy here – he lacks racial pride, but is a loyal and trustworthy friend. The former quality, though, ends up getting him in trouble

Suga lays out the song’s central thesis here – black folks face excessive pressures from outside the race, so they need to cut each other a lot of slack in order to get by, and committing violence against each other just plays into the hands of racists

This section is reminiscent of Kool Moe Dee’s famous lines from “Self Destruction”:

I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan
And I shouldn’t have to run from a black man

“Mayne” is the Bay Area’s exaggerated prononciation of the word “man”

And here she is – Shannon (starts about 0:51)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LnV6z3xrhM

Oddly enough, D.M.Ç. received some interesting news from his mother about twenty years after this cipher. He found out in the mid-aughts that he was adopted, and made a documentary about it that aired in early 2006

While Run-D.M.C. started touring in 1983, the first documented trip overseas of theirs we could find didn’t occur until 1986. We are certainly open to correction if anyone can provide evidence to the contrary

D.M.C. uses a poetic device called epanodos here – basically, repeating words in reversed order. See this note for a more modern example of the device. Perhaps the best-known example is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. Adam Bradley’s book gives more information about these kinds of devices in rap

This verse would appear in slightly modified form on the Run-D.M.C. song “King of Rock”