Because she doesn’t believe that mainstream fame won’t reach her, she’s content on staying underground.

There is word play here on “sheep”:
- Counting “sheep” to go to “sleep”, as one does when they have insomnia.
- Mainstream hip hop audiences who are like “sheep” in that they follow the shepherding of the music industry in their herd-instinct. Which makes them essentially ‘asleep’, unconscious listeners.

Nitty goes crazy on the beat and she expects you to dance or at least move when she speaks.

Despite the fact that African Americans remain second class citizens in many ways, Kweli emphasizes that “We,” blacks, belong here, we are “native sons.”

A basket case is a mentally ill person. Tip is also playing off the basketball analogy of the previous lines.

Referring to the powerful Enron corporation’s several instances of misleading financial accounts.

For Killer Mike, the corruption of Enron is just one example of the everyday cons of allegedly legitimate corporations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zMakN-EMLg

Wordplay about the Bilderberg Group, an annual meeting of over 100 North American and European influential people, often linked to conspiracy theories.

Peep the 2013 list of attendees on News Genius!

Killer Mike’s argument here parallels that of Jon Ronson in The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry in which the author argues that corporate leaders score abnormally high for psychopathic tendencies (i.e. lack of empathy).

“The herb spot” is the place where you buy weed. It’s not flashy, but keeps on the DL, down low.

Dice Raw is addressing the bitter irony that many youth grow up learning to use math in order to understand the drug game, rather than applying it to a more respectable future

This is a topic that “The Wire” deals with extensively in Season 4 focusing on Baltimore schools. It’s clear that the “corner kids” have street knowledge that overlaps with school knowledge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDg4U2jYXgw