Songfacts®:

• The hook features a line about tennis shoes hanging over a power line. Seeing shoes hanging by connected shoelaces on the wire is an iconic urban image, used by drug dealers in the days before cell phones to indicate their location or send signals. Asked by MTV News what the lyric means to him, Jay Rock replied: "It means the hood. Imagine somebody who grows up in the hood and sees this all the time. Every time he walks out on his porch, he sees the same tennis shoes over the wire."
  
  "But at the same time, he says, 'I want to see something change, something different.' It's the same rerun. People get tired of that. That's what the whole album is about. It's me growing up inside this box, a box that a lot of people want to make it out."
• Other artists that have recorded songs titled "The Message" include M.I.A., Dr. Dre, Nas and most famously Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.