One of Sway’s idiosyncrasies is his playfulness. Here, he is talking about gun crime; a serious problem on UK streets. Unlike a lot of rappers who a desperate to claim street credentials, Sway disassociates himself from guns and makes child-like gun noises instead.

This irreverent attitude to violence makes it clear that he is above that kind of thing, even if the reality of it concerns him, as shown in the coming lines…

Lots of typos in here, but he’s basically talking about how much he can charge for a verse. Typical British self-effacing humour in saying that he’ll settle for less than his original bold claim.

ACCEPTED COMMENT: Here Sway points out that whatever he charges for a verse is ‘plus vat’. In the UK VAT (Value Added Tax – V.A.T. or ‘vat’ for short) of 20% (a sort of sales tax) is added to the price of good or services where the provider of the good or service turns over more than £77,000 in a year. Though in 2009, when Say it Twice was released that amount was £68k.

So here, Sway is telling us he’s turning over more than £68kpa, showing this little rapping business of his isn’t doing too badly.

Maybe I listen to too much thugged out music but I always assumed this was a reference to clothes being bloodied from wounds, either from knives or guns. Or maybe it’s just about being rained on. London is a wet city.

Love this play on words. ‘Biting’ is a common hiphop colloquialism for stealing someone else’s rhyme, style, flow, whatever. Here Sway doubles the meaning to include the idiom ‘bite your tongue’, which means to hold back from saying something. So rappers who like ‘biting’ (copying) should take Sway’s advice and just ‘bite their tongues’ (say nothing). Which is fine, as Sway is saying everything more than once anyway.

He also throws in a fluid rhyme with ‘buy’/‘bite’, inviting people to buy his music rather than copy it. This could hark back to his ongoing beef with piracy introduced in ‘Download’ from his first album and continued in ‘Upload’ from his second.

A nicely playful simile. Cul-de-sacs are residential streets that come to an end – you can’t travel through them. Also quite a UK-centric image in keeping with Derek’s British sensibilities.

Sway wears his lyrical dexterity on his sleeve. This is a song based around the concept of saying everything twice, and he launches into it by doing exactly that.

(Worth noting that this is in a long standing tradition of hiphop songs that showcase lyrical skill through pure wordplay, including (for example) Jay-Z’s ‘22 Twos’, in which he fires off 22 references to the number two.)