Pelan is Five Percent slang for The Bronx (the acknowledged birthplace of Hip Hop). Brooklyn is Medina, Manhattan is Mecca, and Queens is The Desert.

Wyandanch and Brentwood are neighbourhoods in Long Island, just minutes away from each other.

Rakim is from Wyandanch. EPMD are famously from Brentwood. As is often the case, the faux-beef between the groups was actually started by the fans in those neighbourhoods rather than the groups themselves.

Erick Sermon tells the story of the feud in this video. Apparently he also told this story to Nas which is how it ended up in the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRh_Njm4pS0

A huge understatement. The rhyme styles that Rakim pioneered on this tune and “My Melody” changed rapping forever. Just ask Nas.

According to folklore this song was originally conceived as an answer record to the Janet Jackson hit “What Have You Done For Me Lately”, released earlier that year.

Once Rakim came on board the track took a different direction but this verse remains as a concession to the original idea.

Wisdom’s clothes meaning women’s clothes. Wisdom represents Woman in Five Percent terminology.

Apparently pistol-packing George is also a cross-dresser (or possibly a transsexual). Sadat seems more offended by this than the armed robberies. But which would you rather run into in the street: a guy with a gun or a guy in a dress?

A good example of Supreme Alphabet wordplay here. As well as implying a frail, emasculated man, the phrase weak cipher man literally means woman.

Cipher represents the letter O and weak is being used in place of Wisdom to represent the letter W. Weak Cipher Man = W O MAN.

Jamar asking why George would want to be a “weak cipher man” suggests that he thinks sexual orientation is a choice, rather than George just being born gay. See Q-Tip’s verse for more of this.

Supreme Alphabet slang for the slur homo.

He represents the letter H and Cipher represents the letter O. The letter M is usually Master but Monkey is used instead to give the phrase a more negative spin.

Puba also uses this phrase in “Nitty Gritty” by KMD.

Six sextillion (6 x 10²¹⁾ metric tons is roughly the mass of the Earth (Google returns 5.9742 sextillion).

This is one of the lessons taught by the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation. Both groups have a list of Actual Facts, basic statistics about the Earth, some more accurate than others. Other such stats you may be familiar with from rap lyrics:

• 93 million miles — the distance between the Earth and the Sun

• 29 million sq. miles — the inhabitable surface area of the Earth (23 million of useful land, 6 million of wasteland)

Poor Righteous Teachers are living up to their name here. Peep the speed of sound reference later in the verse too.

These godly lyrics will take mortal rappers out. 1,120 ft/s is the speed of sound quoted in the aforementioned Actual Facts.

The speed of sound isn’t actually constant — it depends on the physical properties of the material it’s travelling through. But through dry air at 20 °C, sound travels at 1,126 ft/s. Drop the temp to around 16 °C and you get close to the quoted figure.

This reference to amateur detectives The Hardy Boys sets the theme for the track. Like them, Common has a mystery to solve — his own burglary.

These opening lines are adapted from Erick Sermon’s verse on “Get Off the Bandwagon” by EPMD

There was a Hardy Boy mystery you were trying to solve
Can’t understand how you got involved

E Double continues his verse by presenting the listener with three clues. Common discovers three clues in this verse — the time of day of the robbery, the roach in the ashtray, and the chicken.