Songfacts®:

• Nas explained this track where he raps from the perspective of a roach to MTV News: "I get to thinking about how we evolved, how the human family evolved and s--t. And I looked at ants, man. One day, I was looking at a bunch of ants. We've got a lot in common - just like everything that's alive, everything that eats and breathes and builds and creates. There's a connection to even the smallest thing. So I looked at it as the whole world, instead of looking at us as beauty. Inside poverty, inside the street, inside the ghettos and the gutters and the slums, we aren't looked at as beauty out there. We were looked at as the worst pest, and because of that, because of that treatment, some of us started to believe we were a pest, started to believe what we were told, and started to act like it, and started to reproduce my people, bring kids in the world that were f--ked up in the head. You're not this. But if you want to act like this and you want to be this, let's make the metaphor and let me put you right here and say, 'Cool.' The roach motel could be the jails or whatever. Let me just paint that picture and see how you like that. You don't like that, do you? If you don't like that, shake it off, get right and let's start getting the things we supposed to have."
• The veteran act The Last Poets feature on this track. In the early 1970s they laid the groundwork for Hip-Hop with their socially conscious songs performed in a spoken word style.