“Her-on” is the OG way to say heroin. It’s typically injected, but it can be snorted/inhaled.

Perhaps heroin gets stuck in your nose and becomes hard (“frozen”) after a while, similar to how Nas’s lyrics leave his competition frozen with fear. Or maybe the heroin makes people cold from numbing them.

Aesop’s Fables are a collection of writings which teach valuable moral lessons. Nas’s stories differ in that they don’t teach easy moral lessons, but rather dwell on the darker side of life where good deeds go unrewarded and bad deeds go unpunished.

It has been suggested by some scholars that Aesop was a Black African slave from Ethiopia, which makes his position in hip-hop even more prominent.

One of the ideologies of the Five-Percent Nation is the rejection of a traditional God-figure in favor of the belief that the black man on Earth is part God. This is consistent with the way Nas views himself, as he has referred to himself as God’s son and depicted himself as a Christ figure in the past. However, unlike Jesus Christ who is considered fully man and fully divine, Nas considers himself to be a mixture of both.

This phrase was later used as a nickname for both Vince Carter and legendary streetballer Anthony Heyward, as well as the name of a song on Pete Rock’s album Soul Survivor (which sampled the line from this song).

Nas’s father was a jazz musician, so you know that his lyrics are going to be smooth. He compares them to the Villanova hoops team, which was pretty smooth in the way that it handled its upset against Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA finals and the rest of its competition from the late 1980’s to early 90’s.

As D'Angelo Barksdale explains, a “soldier” is a member of a crime organization that is pretty low on the ladder and dispensable to their higher ups. So while you are taking orders from everyone around you Nas is doing his own thing, much like the renegade cop Sylvester “Sly” Stallone plays in the movie Cobra.

Nas' lyrics are flashy and attractive to the masses, but they are also as deep as Stephen King’s psychological horror novel The Shining. Director Stanley Kubrick was very meticulous while adapting The Shining to film, loading it with possible allusions and scenes that took hundreds of takes to get right.

Nas packs a weapon like a notoriously ganja-loving Rastafarian would pack a bowl of marijuana. This line was originally used in an earlier Nas song, “Nas Will Prevail”.

Nas physically injures the beats he raps over in the same way that The Iron Sheik injures his opponents. The Iron Sheik, real name Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, was an Iranian-American pro wrestler who spent years as a heel in the WWF. He and Russian Nikolai Volkoff formed a tag team with their gimmick being that they hate America.

Shaquille O'Neal’s giant hands allow him to hold a basketball (“pill”) with the same ease that Nas rocks a microphone. This can also be heard as “holds appeal”, since Shaq’s quirkiness makes him one of the most popular media personalities out there.