While we at RG dislike turning what seems to be a straightforward line about watching boxing matches from the comfort of your private jet into an elaborate diss, it actually isn’t unreasonable to see this line and the follow bars as jabs at Jay’s frenemy 50 Cent.

First off, Jay literally says “50” before going on to mention Floyd Mayweather, a close friend of 50’s. Next, the main point of this verse is Jay warning Drake to avoid “silly rap feuds”, which makes sense considering he and Fif have been scuffling over trivial shit for years. Finally, 50 called Jay out the last time he collaborated with Drake for working with other artists but not helping out those signed to his label. So what better way to get back at him than by taking him down during another collaboration with Drake?

The first bar has four possible meanings that Jay may have intended to count towards his “triple entendre”.

• “Oww” is a way to call attention to pain. Girls turn their heads so quickly as Jay walks past they suffer pain.
• Owls can turn their heads 270 degrees, so Jay implies women watch him wherever he goes.
• Drake’s OVO Sound crew uses an owl as a logo.
• Jay may be setting up an extended metaphor based around being in the sky, or higher than his competition. This begins with “owl” and ends with the line “caught the Mayweather fight cause the satellite was crispy”.

“Man of the hour” merely means Jay is the centre of attention, hence the following bars, “trillion watt lightbulb when I’m in the nightclub”.

It’s not certain that these interpretations are enough to be a triple entendre. An English professor once went through some of Jay’s most famous lines that are considered multi-entendres, and came to the conclusion that only about 10/50 of Hov’s best “entendres” actually qualified as double-entendres.

True double entendres rely upon more than just dual references; they require two parallel levels of meaning, one explicit and one coded. Traditionally, that coded meaning was usually of a sexual nature. Jay-Z uses a lot of puns—where the humor derives from a similar sounding words and/or that word’s multiple meanings. Jay-Z also uses a lot of similes, and metaphors. Excellent lines like “I was moving birds like an Oriole fitted” and “I’m on the block like I’m 8 feet tall” do convey the sense of two distinct images, but as mentioned before, the meaning is clear, not coded.

Wayne is giving a shoutout to the country of Haiti, which was devastated by an earthquake in January 2010 – much like Alonzo “Zo” Mourning who put in a lot of volunteer work to raise money for Haiti in the wake of the disaster.

Wayne shouts out Zoe Pound, a Haitian street gang.

Ren frequently refers to himself as the villain of the group, even going so far as to name his 1996 solo album The Villain In Black.

Complex ranked Ice Cube’s album-opening bars as the 21st best opening line in Rap history, writing:

In two bars, Ice Cube gave you the setting and the character, and conveyed it with the visceral directness that would become a mark of gangster rap from that point on. Since this time, every gangster rap record is a variation on these two immortal themes: a violent setting and an unreliable, even psychotic, narrator.

A rap verse is usually between 16 and 32 musical bars (both verses on this song are maxed out at 32.) However, after those rhymes have been spit, most rappers don’t even see a shred of the value their rhymes have created.

This chart was directed more at a rock audience, but the breakdown between label, distributors, and artist holds true. The label and distributors take the chunk of the money, while the artist gets a small slice that has to be divided further amongst the producers and others who worked to make the music.

“The Music Industry’s Funny Money”

Moral of the story: obey rule #4080.

A reference to the title of the album on which this song appears. As for the meaning of “Stankonia”? In Big Boi’s words:

“Stankonia is whatever’s the funkiest shit ever. It could be that purple, or that funky-ass music.”