As Clyde Smith on the "Fishscale" intro:

"A lot of these Tom Cruise niggas don't know, man."

"...and all that other ????? fuckin' Tom Cruise nigga, like we ain't Vanilla Sky or nuttin' in the streets."

A lot of Raekwon's rhymes are just straight up undecipherable (in a great way) at least on first listen, but this Tom Cruise name-check and mention of Vanilla Sky is just .....what!?!? I don't have the slightest idea what he's going for here. Anyone?

First of all, claiming "we Vanilla Sky in these streets" has got to be one of the oddest "street nigga" boasts in hip-hop, if that's even what it is.


Taking a shot in the dark here, calling whoever he's talking about "these Tom Cruise niggas" could be another way of calling them faggots. I don't know how tuned-in to the Hollywood rumor mill Raekwon is though.

This is a coke rap album if there ever was one, all the way down to the title. The Vanilla Sky thing could be another one of those instances where a rapper takes something that's white and makes it a metaphor (for lack of a better term) for cocaine, like "white girl". There's a million examples of this, but I don't really think this is one of them.

What the fuck is he talking about here?