Sadly, Thought’s adolescence pre-dates YouTube, so there’s no extant footage of a young Tariq dancing to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcx8Jn23xw

Thought names this as the song that made him want to be an MC in this interview.

The group was the subject of a bit of a bidding war in late 1993. Roots manager Rich Nichols told Coleman:

Kenyatta Bell at Mercury was first up to bat. He offered $75,000, which eventually got bumped up to $150,000. That was definitely respectable money at the time. Then Epic and East West made offers. In the end, Wendy Goldstein at Geffen was the one who offered the most. After Arrested Development got big, I think her boss told her, ‘Find a band who play their own instruments and don’t talk about guns.’

1986 was the time Thought and Questlove first met at Philadelphia’s High School for the Creative & Performing Arts.

In Brian Coleman’s indispensable book Check the Technique, Black Thought explains the reasoning behind this seemingly random date:

[W]hen I say, ‘Representing Philly on the twenty-eighth of June’ on there, that was the original [1994] release date of the album, when we were recording that song. It got pushed back a lot later than that, eventually

The album wouldn’t be released until January 17, 1995

This line is likely a nod to Big Daddy Kane’s classic song “Ain’t No Half Steppin”. Kane is a big influence on Thought, and Thought does a mean Kane impression to boot. Below, the two of them together in 2007

Not only is Freddie’s daughter well-disciplined, she’s also a pretty good rapper:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEUuw6b4kGk

Indeed, the infamous “LIRR shooter” Colin Ferguson faced numerous racially motivated attacks in jail, and they got bad enough that his lawyer requested that the Department of Justice intervene. This is, by most measures, a pretty liberal definition of “snitching”

More germanely, Freddie told RG that he had heard reports from a friend in jail with Ferguson of the notorious inmate’s propensity to snitch

The Gavin Report was a long-running and influential radio industry trade publication with widely-read Top 40 listings. It existed from 1958-2002

True enough! This album’s title track is a vicious dis of some of the record industry’s most powerful players