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R.A.’s father, John Thorburn was a wizard with weapons, so no wonder R.A. had the opportunity to learn from the best. That’s why Rugged Man now possesses a lot of random weapons and is nice with the hands. On “Tom Thum”, R.A. also spits:

After school my daddy used to teach me combative Green Beret tactics

For more of the J.A. Thornburn story, see “Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story”.

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And he means it. According to RA himself, rumors have accused him of rape, assault, scat play and animal cruelty. He is all about causing issues and everyone hates him, so if the mainstream start giving him good reviews and praising him, they will come off as kind of hypocrites, because R.A. has always been intelligent — looks can be deceiving. But he’s ready to fight against everything, so he has no problem with everyone hating him.

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The 1987 film Penitentiary III features a ferocious little person named (wait for it) Midnight Thud, whom the sadistic guards would throw in your cell to kick your ass.

Thud was portrayed by midget wrestler The Haiti Kid. Does the whole song make a little more sense now?

“Never seeing the penitentiary” is a double entendre here:

  • Despite to all the crazy things he did, R.A. never faced prison.

  • After seeing the scary psychotic midget Midnight Thud, R.A. never wanted to watch the original movie Penetentiary.

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Reference to the song “Hard Times” by Run-D.M.C., which is a cover of a Kurtis Blow song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkRqXuDg2IE

Although he went through a lot of shit in his life, R.A. feels like that helped him become the person he is now. He spoke about it in an interview:

I’m glad — that was luck to me, I’m glad it happened, cause I got smacked in the face and put in the real world. And it was devastating. It was like “Yo, can I survive this? What the fuck do I do with my life?” It was devastating, but it woke me the fuck up and put me in the real world with real people again. Because if I was 17, 18 and never got to see the real world again, and was on this big giant cloud that “I am the great R.A. I deserve everything I got,” I would be one of these disgusting Hollywood pieces of garbage celebrities. So I feel blessed that God smacked me in the face and woke me up and said, “Hey motherfucker, POW POW, you don’t have shit now.” Because then I had to work from the bottom again to become successful. And it helped ground me to be a real person in the real world.

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There’s a lot going on in these lines. Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” from 1860, was part of his Tales of a Wayside Inn collection of poems that tried to capture the flavor of oral tradition. It was explicitly meant to be read aloud (something for your ear).

The poem depicts Paul Revere as a mythic hero — the “new millennium version,” as R.A. styles himself, is very much an anti-hero. The allusion is more apt when you consider the title of the song, and the poem’s unofficial title, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

Though it’s based on a real event, Longfellow’s poem is hugely inaccurate, to the extent that R.A. calls it fiction. He’s probably alluding to the habit rappers often have of claiming to talk about real life while making a lot of shit up. R.A. promises to give you the unvarnished truth.

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Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields were both vaudeville veterans and popular comedians of the silent era. Both were immensely successful and neither of them died broke (though Fields drank himself to death), so the two lines probably don’t go together.

As with the Busby Berkeley line earlier, it’s unclear what the connection is, but it’s obvious that R.A. is a big fan of early cinema.

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That’s what he got as the moral of his life story. Of course, this was before Bad Biology, which he wrote and also acted in, came out and did well. Now he seems to be after that movie money. His profile, in general, has been rising. Maybe he changed his mind.

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From an Afrocentric group like Arrested Development, you would expect God to guide Speech to Africa (as suggested in the prior lines about heritage).
The song is suggesting that the African American experience is way more relevant to its central questions than the African experience.

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Calls back to the trees of a few lines ago. Combined with the “family name” concept, this line has strong slavery resonances.

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draw my chrome-plated handgun and shoot you in the head

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