Outside the Lines With Rap Genius - OTL 64: Excerpt #3 "Being Real and Being Rich" lyrics

Dan Charnas: Think of it this way -- it was the dichotomy. Being real was the pretense of d**h Row, right, and being rich was the pretense of Bad Boy. And that came out of after a golden era where folks just wanted to be right. But there was this little sort of buffer area in that transition, and I think that Cypress Hill's album and Dre's first solo album The Chronic were really key points in that transition. They're great great albums but what they did... You know, Cypress was political but at the same time, it's like "Yeah, sh**'s f**ed up, let's just go smoke some weed". That weed-ed period between 91 and 93 was sort of the gateway drug to what then became keeping it real. Which, more often than not, did not keep it real, right? It was people playing at being real. And also playing at being rich, and then of course, being rich