Prince Ea is arguably the smartest guy in hip-hop. He’s largely unknown and resides far underground in the rap world, but the dude deserves recognition for having a brain that works like no other. Here are 40 reasons as to why this holds true.

Song name in bold, quote in quotes, and a short explanation in italics for those that maybe aren’t well versed in the subject matter.

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40. Letter To The President (To: Obama, From: The People)

“We can’t talk economy until we talk greed

Until we talk poverty, and then we talk needs

Until we talk love, and then we grab each other’s hands and then we all hug

It’s all of us together, no Democrats or Republicans those are just names

To distract us from the fact that we are human beings”

It’s true, we can’t fix the problems of this country unless we come together to realize the real underlying problems.

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39. Amazing Nerd Rapper Pwns Bullies

“I’m very committed to charities

Last week I performed ‘Whip My Hair’ with Willow at a chemotherapy clinic”

Ea is a witty dude.

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38. Smoking Weed With The President

“See, you’re the president that I believe can handle this

Heck, ya campaign slogan was ‘Yes We Cannabis’”

A play on Obama’s campaign slogan in a song about the economic and societal positives of legalizing marijuana from a rapper that doesn’t use drugs.

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37. Effortless

“They saying it’s a new day

In a game full of squares, he’s a new shape

He’s like watching School Days on Blu-Ray

Why?

Cause he’s old school, but he does it in a new way”

He’s different from other rappers, and he has the feel of older, classic hip-hop artists with a newer twist to it.

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36. The Real Death Of Auto Tune

“The best player don’t check his stats

He just goes in to kill them in the first and the second half

I knock down them shots that you afraid to take

It’s as plain as day, no rapper can contain him, he’s dangerous”

Ea doesn’t worry about selling records or gaining mainstream popularity. He focuses on spitting the truth, and nobody else truly does what he does.



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35. Amazing Nerd Rapper Pwns Bullies

“Last name Ever, first name Greatest

Middle name Blackberry, shout out to my haters”

Calling out Drake for his “Blackberry freestyle” is always fun.

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34. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“Did you know Obama’s Peace Prize was fulfillment of Revelations?”

Revelations says “The Antichrist will rise to power as a man of peace.” No, I don’t believe he’s calling Obama the Antichrist. Moreso just presidents in general, and Obama rose to power calling for peace in the Middle East (which he hasn’t achieved yet, by the way)



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33. Letter To The President (To: Obama, From: The People)

“And on top of that, my best friend got life for a charge

Which is ironic Mr. Obama

I said my best friend just got life for a charge

Which is ironic, cause we both might die with these bars”

His best friend got life for a crime he committed. He will likely die behind bars. Ea’s bars refer to the rap lines he is spitting (lines are basically bars in rap), and he might die with them because the problems that he’s calling out might never change, and he will end up perishing in the midst of these problems if they go unfixed.



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32. Responding to Cassidy (Freestyle)

“I can’t listen to yikkity yik and yakkity yak

Cause dude, that’s not music

You sound stupid like fat people calling other fat people fat”

Most rappers rap about stupid irrelevant things, which he compares to fat people calling each other fat.



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31. Smoking Weed With The President

“Forget about the stigma

Forget the opinions of politicians

Cause collective ignorance don’t mean wisdom

Forget about pandering to the system

Cause when the system’s wrong, sir, it’s your duty to go against it

I urge you to re-read that 9th amendment

And have courage and conviction and remember your commitment

To the people”

Collective ignorance doesn’t mean wisdom. Obama needs to remember his commitment to the citizens and abide by what the general American public want to see, not by the ideas of other political pundits.

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30. The Real Death Of Auto Tune

“Thank God most of these niggas spittin are terrible

Cause I ain’t even that good, I’m just good by comparison”

Another line about rap being ridiculously dumb these days.



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29. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“See on these beats man I take you through my episodes

And every show I let you see my life

Both the blessings and the lessons that I teach outright

I get deep with every speech I write

We all got God in us, but I know how to bring out Christ”

Ea puts us into his shoes and shows us his soul in his raps in order to teach us things.



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28. 2009 MC Showcase

“Even Ali don’t wanna see the jabs when I box

Cause I float like a butterfly and sting like an African wasp

I can get you shot with a knife or stabbed with a Glock”

Ali’s go-to phrase was “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”. Ea makes a play on that, and then claims he can shoot you with a knife and stab you with a pistol, cause he’s that good.



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27. 2009 Flashback

“Young Money kept the flame

It’s just a shame I couldn’t tell none of them apart from Lil Wayne”

Bagging on the Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Drake crew is always fun. Ea thinks most mainstream rappers sound identical.



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26. Jesus Shuttlesworth

“The world’s ours, but the critics say we can’t win

They see me walk on water, they say it’s cause I can’t swim”

The haters will hate no matter what he does and accomplishes. Also likely a play on stereotypes, how black people are often stereotyped as not being able to swim.



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25. Why (Remix)

“Why the feds keep raising the interest rates?

And why our government gotta take our freedoms away to keep us safe?

Why is the truth minimized?

Why they call it collateral damage when statistically it’s genocide?”

The government takes away our rights given to us by the constitution and the amendments and claims it’s for our own good. The government also go after terrorists and thinks it’s okay to kill hundreds of civilians in order to nab a single terrorist. Ea thinks that’s wrong and should be considered genocide.



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24. Letter To The President (To: Obama, From: The People)

“I read your book, on Page 63 you quoted King

But did you know the last speech he wrote before he died wasn’t about a dream?

It was about poverty, greed, and great despair

And he named the sermon, ‘Why America May Go To Hell’”

Ea reads, what a cool young man! King is known for preaching equality, but he also warned us about another problem, relating mostly to poverty, and encouraged us to fix that… 50 years ago.



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23. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“What I gotta do to prove that I’m different?

Everybody rap now, but they don’t speak like Richard

Marvin Minsky, they certainly don’t think like Richard

The flow ill, I grow gills, they don’t breath like Richard

Because I paint such a beautiful picture

You know you the truth when you make a nigga Google your lyrics”

That’s so true Ea, I had to Google Marvin Minsky to figure out he’s a scientific figurehead in artificial intelligence Nobody is like Ea.

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22. Smoking Weed With The President

“The Newspapers printed fake stories

About how every puff destroys your brain

Making you crazy insane, prone to murder and rape

They used race and said again

That weed makes white women wanna get pregnant

By Negroes and immigrant Mexicans”

Weed was torn apart by propaganda techniques, often in regards to race.

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21. I’m A Renegade

“And the real reason I carry the heavenly sword

Is cause he who preaches peace must be ready for war”

Anyone who tries to settle for peace and bury the hatchet will have to fight for it, literally or metaphorically.



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20. 2009 MC Showcase

“Wait, do you even know what time is? Are you able to define it?

A Western conception in which your mind is aligned with

You could set up independents and constants to figure out my content

But it’ll never happen, cause you left out one factor: this is God’s gift”

What is time? Is it real and legitimate? Not really. Also, you can’t truly decipher Prince’s lines.



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19. The Real Death Of Auto Tune

“My pops sat me down and told me

Richard, never tip the waiter before a meal”

Can’t base everything on expectations. They won’t always hold true.

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18. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“'But why you ain’t signed, where’s your deal?

You been saying this was your year for the past five in a row’

I said John, peep it, I don’t even know,

I’ve been in the meetings, but see I should stop at the door

I hear the same thing, not profitable

Too smart, too much thought, not marketable

I’m at a loss, so I sit back and frown my face

Like what the fuck, y'all wanting me to sound like Drake?”

Talking to his friend about why he isn’t signed, Ea tells him it’s because the record labels know that smart, provocative hip-hop isn’t marketable on a large scale.

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17. Smoking Weed With The President

“As for the kids, yeah, I’d agree except

It’s easier for kids to buy weed than to buy beer or cigarettes

Is that surprising? Think about it, sir

How many drug dealers you know ask to see ID?”

How true is that though?

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16. Letter To The President (To: Obama, From: The People)

“So many lost overseas we can’t keep scores

It’s like peace has become just intervals between wars”

We lose so many lives fighting wars, and now peace is scarce and hard to come by.



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15. 2009 MC Showcase

“I’m the only rapper alive who’s been to heaven battling Pac

I spit a thousand til he asked me to stop

I battled and mocked, that shit was pretty crazy

That baldhead nigga thought that he would step up to Prince Ea and finna play me?

He wasn’t intimidating, I’ve been amazing

Had him nervous, he started spitting verses from Brenda’s Baby

That’s what happens when you mess with the best

He ran off stage, I said ‘Which dead nigga’s next?’”

He owned Tupac, a rapper who many people chart as the all time greatest.



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14. Spaz The Fuck Out (100 Bar Freestyle)

“They say you only live once

I tell them ‘I know, I learned that from one of my former lives’”

A play on YOLO.

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13. Responding to Cassidy (Freestyle)

“I’m the pacifist from Nazareth who raised Lazarus

And came back in a miraculous act”

Instead of being like Kanye and saying “I’m Jesus”, Ea makes the same phrase much more poetic.



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12. BET Hot 16 Freestyle

“Everybody knew the savior would arrive in that divine flesh

Just not as a skinny black kid from the projects”

Hey look, Ea is still Jesus. This time he’s the resurrection as himself, a skinny black kid from the projects.

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11. Why (Remix)

“Why you can’t handle the facts?

Why is 500 grams of coke equal to 5 grams of crack?

Why you worried about my delivery and not my message?

How you think you gonna get the answers if you don’t ask the questions?”

Crack is associated with poverty and blacks whilst cocaine is associated with richer folks. Law enforcement cracks down on crack so much harder than on coke. Racism built into the system? Also, stop worrying about his flow and listen to the lyrics underneath it.

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10. The Real Death of Auto Tune

“Everybody’s talking about swag, and that’s sad to me

Cause I had swag when they called it personality”

The best play on the “swag” phase yet. He had swag before swag.



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9. Smoking Weed With The President

“Cause if you really wanna stimulate the economy

And mitigate the problems that emanate from poverty

It’s time to legalize this billion dollar commodity

Harvard professor Jeffrey Myron estimated

9 billion dollars generated in taxes from regulation

Plus another 11 will be saved from law enforcement, resources, and incarcerations

That’s 20 billion total every year

You saying this country don’t need that kind of paper?

Put it towards environment, invest in education

Infrastructure in conjunction with job creation”

The economic reasons behind the legalization of marijuana in a few hip-hop bars.

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8. Responding to Cassidy

“You win some, you lose some, but that’s a small price

Cause at the end of the day you good, aint no lost life

But I guess that’s the hood, that’s just the hard plight

When you from a place where every day is a dark night

Aint no freedom songs

Police been telling us to freeze so long, why you think we got out arms iced?

Talking about life in the hood with a bomb of a line at the end. Arms iced as in all of the bling people from the hoods wear.



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7. Forever (Youtube Remix)

“All them fellas show me love

And all the women show me cleavage

The kids knew all my songs word for word and said I was Jesus

But I wasn’t leading them to freedom

I was teaching them to keep reaching for things

With no significance and meaning

It was greed that made me poison my own people with these records

I gotta end it all, fuck it, no more being selfish

The bridge is just after this intersection

So do I want this shit forever?

Nah, just a couple more seconds”

Once again, tearing apart the problems in mainstream rap. He ends the verse with a metaphorical suicide, leading to a more conscious rapper.

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6. BET Hot 16 Freestyle

“’Am I nice, how? Understand, never will they’

That wasn’t a question, instead it was a statement

Translate it backwards”

Translate it backwards. “They will never understand how nice I am.” He just played us all.



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5. Magnum (Freestyle)

“I gave a lot of rappers the game, let them select my style

And now they all sound just like vowels

‘Ay Ea, I owe you’”

He showed a lot of rappers that SMART can be COOL, and now they’re all thanking him like vowels. “Ay Ea, I owe you”, or A,E,I,O,U, the 5 vowels of the English language.



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4. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“But fuck rap I should work as an EMT

The way I turn Pro Tools to a EEG, and that booth into a ER

After each bar I tell the beat ‘don’t you fucking die on me!’

All eyes on Ea, I’m Pac, Biggie and Pun… If you combined all three

Mixed them in a pot and five four three

Out comes the chimera, I’m a side show freak”

EMT = Emergency medical technician. Pro Tools = Music mixing and production program. EEG = Electroencephalography, records brain activity. Booth = Recording booth. ER = Emergency room.



He compares his music making style to what medical professionals do while saving lives, cause he’s saving hip-hop. Then he makes a play on Pac’s album All Eyes On Me and compares himself to a supermutant of a combination of 3 of rap’s most iconic stars.

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3. Bars From Sumer

“Since when does absence of evidence equate to evidence of absence?”

Think about it. Just because there isn’t evidence showing something 100% exists doesn’t mean that thing 100% doesn’t exist. I.E. Aliens? Or dinosaurs to people a few hundred years ago without the knowledge we have now.

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2. Funk Volume Contest Winner (Freestyle)

“I rep the Lou, but I could tell you where I’m really from

[Hand gestures and mouth movements without making any sound]

I’m an alien, and that was my native tongue”

Prince Ea speaks ALIEN!!! And as it turns out, we can’t even perceive the sounds aliens make with our spectrum of hearing. Who knew?

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1. Make Smart Cool (Freestyle)

“They don’t make extrapolations on a nation,

Like who gave the Africans AIDS? That’s not a question, it’s a statement”

This one took me a few years to really figure out. Who gave the Africans AIDS? Read it again. WHO gave the Africans AIDS? Now turn it into a statement. WHO gave the Africans AIDS. Google “WHO”. World Health Organization. The World Health Organization gave the Africans AIDS. When the AIDS virus started to grow exponentially, the W.H.O was giving out vaccinations for the Smallpox virus. Coincidence? Prince Ea raises the idea that it might not be. Crazy, just crazy!!

