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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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Around this 2002-3 period, and in the years preceeding, Jay faced numerous legal problems, from the infamous Lance “Un” Rivera stabbing to arrests on a gun charge
What is this?
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Hov’s false friends claim that they were supporting him well before it was even possible to do so – in this case, throwing up his signature Roc sign even before he invented it
More specifically, Jay was sued by the wrestler Diamond Dallas Paige because he felt that Jay stole the Roc sign from his similar “Diamond Cutter” symbol
Claiming they been runnin' and tellin' everybody, like Martin Lawrence JAY-Z (Ft. Freeway) – 8 Miles and Runnin'
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The cheerleader language here provides some very funny visuals for the listener. The “running and telling” language is a reference to comedian Martin Lawrence’s then-new standup movie Runteldat
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This song’s central conceit of “8 Miles” comes from the Eminem-starring movie 8 Mile, on whose soundtrack this song appears
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Jay’s classic ode to that most rare of rap topics, maturity. Produced by Dr. Dre, it was released as a promotional single, which didn’t even make it on to the Billboard charts.
More popular became the remix, with a brilliant verse from André 3000.
The song tackles what Jay first introduced on “What More Can I Say”, the notion of growing up and bringing the rap game along with him.
And I don’t wear jerseys, I’m 30-plus
Give me a crisp pair of jeans, n—, button up
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In reality, bringtheheat.com appears to be a message board for fans of house and disco music
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What is this?
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A fact she’s apparently not shy about demonstrating at photo shoots:
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A declaration of war on the kind of rap represented in the Three 6 Mafia-penned tune “Hard Out Here For A Pimp” from the movie Hustle & Flow
This line, one of the pitiably few sympathetic to sex workers in the rap corpus, is reminiscent of Boots Riley’s message from The Coup’s “Ghetto Manifesto”:
Met Donald Trump and he froze up
Standing on his Bentley yelling “Pimps down, hoes up”
This is also an example of Intersectionality
-3
This is also a reference to “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night” also by The Coup, which portrays how a pimp kills one of “his” hookers, among other things.
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This is valuable input, but unless there’s a really specific reference that going over my head, I don’t see these lines as a literal, specific call out of the musicians you mentioned, though I do agree that Tech agrees with the sentiment of calling them out. While many of Tech’s historical references double as critiques of the rap industry, not all of them do. Beef with the rap industry is definitely not one of the top drivers of Tech’s writing. It seems third or fourth tier to me, behind imperialism, capitalism, and the suffering those things have created so much of.
I think this couplet is simply Tech nodding to one of the oldest and least-acknowledged hierarchical class system of exploitation: the gender order of men over women. It seems like Tech is acknowledging the doubled-disadvantage of lower class women of color. Perhaps even hoping to plant seeds in the minds of those who in the tradition of the genre romanticize coercive prostitution (that more closely resembles sex slave work), hoping that seed gets watered and the next generation of rappers drop the misogyny and elevate women to equals in their eyes.