Knox Hill - Killshot (Lyrical Breakdown, misheard lyrics)

I don't have the entire set of lyrics, but fuck it. If he ever releases them, I'm just gonna redo this post. This was sorta fun, trying to catch all the bars. I intentionally did this myself before watching any reaction videos on this song. After listening the song about 10 times (about three of those pausing and going back, trying to catch the bars), this is what I got:

Dear Knox Hill

Congratulations

You've been demonetized

Oh you know when defeated

Come get rapped/wrapped in a hurry

Imma / Oh my flow's getting heated like it's Jackson, Missouri

Get a dose of the season and I splash bro to curry

I'mma go for a reason and aggress(ive) I'll leave you buried, woah

Quick pen and bars, spending charge, I'm the boss, I'm the best, period, this menopause / this meta pause / this metal pause / these men I'll pause

It's been a war, in the (?), I've seen the corpses, pick up sluts like dental floss

My pen will gloss, when I record I recall, ya'll imagine who you want, you need a caption on your bars, you just had to know façades(?), I don't need the cliff notes, I'm like Zelda - golden frauds(?), send you to the crypt ho / crypto, I don't scam like Logan Paul

Jesus don't cross me, you leeches exhausting, all you do is bla bla yada yada, I'm the Baba Yaga, hadasaka(?), harder than the yakuza, you talk a lot lada yada, you ain't got the heart, your heart is water

I'll leave a ho when I'm drillin intrumentals, don't  fuck with my dogs or I'll feed you in a kennel, I'm lit like John Wick, I could kill you with a pencil, ay

Now imagine me broke, deep in a hole, where my knees won't go, try and reach rope as I sink low, when I bleed my woes/wounds, but the peace/piece my hope try to reach my foes

Hated for my skin tone, tinted/tainted as an Em clone, how could they explain it - I was only ever painting what I've known

I've been low, but the way I earned through this pain/pane, a window

The government be tappin the phone is all trackin / track and control, got a map on your home (?), is way back when they push the LSD and smack the black person that's trapped in a hole/whole

(???) conscience push the cocaine, if you'll track and they'll spend it, they use the cold war to wear mask and offenders, harass (?) and then they had the nerve to claim a crack epidemic?

But fuck being woke, they still sleepin on me, like the Poe(?) in the streets, so I scroll through these beats, phone charged 'til I find another bone to release, fuck em (?) and em (?), I'm a roax(?) in a heat, who you know pennin' me? I don't beef, I just eat, this is what I excrete

With the number two, spittin' any one or two piece and through are you fool sitting(?) what (?) I do, who?

But where the fuck were you when we were suitin' up in the same corner where they were shootin up, pushin' dust in the cut, I was moving  CDs with no love, tryna get a bus/bush/push and move it up

And fuck the mainstream, I don't really see value with the ice and the whips that will only devalue, they sellin you a pill, you don't need to evaluate, put some fentanyl in you don't need to be bottled

Stay free and in the tenants(?), they sell you all this racket, but I ain't in the (?), still it fits in the room and these donkeys in the tennis(?) but I ain't voting any, I'm independent.

Hey, do what you love, man! And fuck anyone who tells you you can't!

Killshot to the labels, I'm out.

So... There are a lot of words I cannot catch (just the brackets with a question mark), a lot of words I'm not sure if I heard him correctly (the word, then the brackets and the question mark, no spaces) and one first half of a bar I can't catch (the bracket with three question marks). The reasons I cannot catch them all are many: 1) He likes to bend the words to fit the rhyme scheme, and my foreigner brain cannot understand the word when it's not pronounced correctly. I've rejected certain rappers from my playlist in the past for this very reason. I sorta like it now that they do that, it's very creative in a way, but it's just harder for me to catch the bars, and therefore harder to understand what you're saying, in a genre where the most important thing is what you are saying. I'm just saying. 2) His delivery is quite clear, but I've heard clearer. And in this song, his vocals are not in the very front of the mix, they're a little bit under the beat... 3) Sometimes he goes too fast, but I do catch his bars in his fast rap flows after a few listens, so that's not the case on this particular song. 4) He might be using slang words or refering to people I don't know. And there's no way for me to know if he is, other than googling random sounds I hear, like "roax".

If I didn't catch enough words from a bar, I left it out of this breakdown.

 Breakdown

"Dear Knox Hill
Congratulations
You've been demonetized"

This bar is about his YouTube career. Reaction channels deal with demonetization all the time. It's when they're allowed to keep a song on the video, but they're not allowed to make money from the video, i.e. through ads the viewers watch. YouTube and music are Knox's career, his income, how he supports his wife and two little girls. There is a law in the US that technically should allow a person to "give their opinion on current events" or something like that, but then there's also record labels and distributors and such. TankTheTech is a YouTuber who works in the music industry (as a guitar technician for metal bands) and he did a questionnaire to artists, bands, record labels and distributors about their opinion on reaction channels. Artists and record labels like reaction channels. It's free marketing for the song. Distributors are the ones who actually do the copyright claims against YouTubers. And only one of them even responded to him. They basically said that personally they (the person who answered) doesn't have a problem with the channels, but this opinion might not align with the opinion of the place they work in.

"Oh you know when defeated
Come get rapped/wrapped in a hurry
Imma / Oh my flow's getting heated like it's Jackson, Missouri
Get a dose of the season and I splash bro to curry
I'mma go for a reason and aggress(ive) I'll leave you buried, woah"

Using the word 'defeat', to me, makes it clear that just like the original Killshot, this, too, is a diss track.
Knox is "rapping in a hurry", rapping fast. "Wrapped in a hurry" to me sounds like who/what he's dissing, produces stuff fast, but it looks/sounds bad, like a quickly wrapped present.
His flow is hot, he's giving you heat (figuratively), but so, apparently, is Jackson, Missouri. I don't know anything about Jackson, Missouri. I googled and apparently it exists. Knox is saying it's hot in there (the temperature is high), possibly also refering to something that happened in Jackson, Missouri (things got heated). It might also have a particularly hot season, since he's saying it's heated and then saying "get a dose of the season". He's giving you the dose, splashing you to a curry. Which is hot as well. But also, he's gonna eat you up.
He says he's "going for a reason", he has a reason to diss the person/thing he's dissing. And he's gonna go so hard he'll kill you.

"Quick pen and bars, spending charge, I'm the boss, I'm the best, period, this menopause / this meta pause / this metal pause / these men I'll pause"

He's smart, so he writes his songs quick. And he's a skillful rapper, so he can rap fast.
Charge is money, which is something you spend. But also, charge is when you accuse someone of something, and he's "spending" the charge = taking it from his head, through the pen and into the bars.
Period aka "the dot", the character. But also period, when a person with a womb bleeds once a month, until it stops when they get old, which is called a menopause. I'd say Knox is stopping you, but that'd imply he's stopping you from bleeding, so... Probably not what he meant. 
When he says "meta pause", he pauses in the video (stops walking for a while).
"Metal pause", as in a bullet, a killshot.
And the metal pause is killing you, "pausing" the men (their hearts, because they die).

"It's been a war, in the (?), I've seen the corpses, pick up sluts like dental floss"

"It's been a war" makes sense when you've heard the entire song. Independent artists and reaction channels fight with big corporations like record labels, music distributors and Google (which owns YouTube) all the time. They fight for the rights to have reaction videos up, they fight for people's attention and time and money, and so on. I don't know if Knox has lost people he knows in this particular war, though.
So, the bar could also refer to the hiphop gang wars, where many rappers were killed by other rappers.
Or how he's lost people to suicide. But that's a bit far fetched, we aren't talking about depression here.
Or, especially considering the next bar (the sluts and dental floss one), it could be Knox, who's killing other rappers with his awesome rapping skills. Taking the killshots. He's picking them off his teeth like they're dental floss.
I also get a sexual innuendo. He's talking in a past tense, how he used to "pick up sluts" aka either pick up women (flirt with them, and then sleep with them) or possibly sleep with prostitutes. Maybe. He rarely talks about his past relations with women. His first girlfriend was from South America, and current wife is from Great Britain, but that's pretty much all I know of his romantic/sexual relationships.

"My pen will gloss"

Maybe one of those fancy metallic pens you see business men have in movies?
Or that the ink of his pen is glossy, because he just wrote the bars, they're fresh?
Or he's just saying his words are shining, they're lit, etc. 

"when I record I recall, ya'll imagine who you want"

I think... that when he records a YouTube video or a song, he recalls that whoever's listening/watching, imagines him to be who they want him to be. Instead of who he really is.

"you need a caption on your bars"

Ouch. :'D Yes I do. I can't catch all the bars. But in the off chance that he's not talking about me (jk), he's taking shots at mumble rappers. They need to put captions on their bars, because without the captions, no one could be able to catch ANY bars.

"you just had to know façades"

Hmm. Unless he suddenly switched who he's talking to (who he's dissing), I don't know what he means. If he did switch, he could mean he's trying to expose someone. To let us know about the façades, the fakes.

"I don't need the cliff notes"

Cliff notes are rough guidelines of something. He already knows what's up, he doesn't need it explained to him. And he's Hill, he doesn't need a cliff.

"I'm like Zelda - golden frauds(?)"

Zelda is one of the central characters in the video game franchise The Legend of Zelda. (Geek points for Knox!) I haven't played them, though, so I googled "zelda golden" and got a bunch of pictures of a golden horse. There's that expression, "to back the wrong horse"... It means "Guess wrongly or misjudge a future outcome". These are the frauds he's exposing. There's also the Trojan horse of the Greek mythology, although that was made of wood and not gold. But not all that glitters is gold, some of it is fake. It looks like gold, but isn't. Trojan horse is also a malware, a malicious computer program that disguises itself as a normal computer program.
Golden frauds can also mean fake gold teeth? Or gold caps, aka just the surface of the tooth is gold, or the slang word "cap", like lie.
This is, like, my favourite bar so far. It goes so deep. I had to do one google search to understand it, but after that everything just poured out of me. I love it when that happens.

"send you to the crypt ho / crypto, I don't scam like Logan Paul"

His flow is so sick you're gonna die. And he's not a scam, he's the real deal.
But also, Logan Paul is this one douchebag, and one of the douchebag things he did was scam people with a crypto currency scam.

"Jesus don't cross me"

To cross someone is to get in their way. Don't get in Knox's way, you're gonna get a killshot. "Jesus" in this context is used kinda like a swear word. Like "Jesus! Don't cross me!" I don't think he's talking to Jesus, though, since if I remember correctly, he is Christian...
Jesus also died on the cross.

"you leeches exhausting, all you do is bla bla yada yada, I'm the Baba Yaga, hadasaka(?), harder than the yakuza, you talk a lot lada yada, you ain't got the heart, your heart is water"

The leeches, people trying to benefit from his success, are exhausting. And they talk a lot, but aren't saying anything.
Baba Yaga is a witch character in Russian folklore. She eats children, Knox has some bars in this song about figuratively eating his enemies. It's fitting. And Baba Yaga is interesting, you should google her. I studied Russian and we read a little bit about her as an exercise, and my best friend (who was born in Russia and moved to Finland when he was 5) told me a little bit more about Baba Yaga. If I remember correctly, she's used in means to scare kids to not go near swamps. I've also read a fantasy book where she's one of the antagonists, but Knox hasn't read that, the book only exists in Finnish.
Yakuza is the Japanese mafia, basically. And they are not to be messed with. Very ruthless and brutal in their ways. Knox says he's harder than them.
"Your heart is water"... Water... is wet, is liquid, is clear, is bland... But water is also necessary to life, i.e. people need water to survive. For me, this paints a picture of a person who loves a lot of people, but ends up not loving anyone properly, because they try to love everyone (their love is water, a liquid that goes everywhere if it's not contained). The love does help all those people the person shows to love to, they need it and they benefit from it, but it does feel kinda bland to them, because the person loving them is loving too many people.

"I'll leave a ho/hoe/hole when I'm drillin intrumentals"

He's leaving a ho. I don't know who she is.
He's leaving a hoe, the tool you make holes with, and picks up a power tool, a drill.
He also leaves holes where he drills. All I can think about is Jeffrey Dahmer. He was a serial killer and i.e. drilled holes into his victims heads. Like Knox is drilling a hole with his rap drill, into your mind.
The instrumental he used is from Eminem's Killshot, which is doing the same. Killing you with the mental capacity it takes to break stuff down, slaughtering the enemies with the shots.

"don't fuck with my dogs or I'll feed you in a kennel"

In a kennel? Or to a kennel?
Men are sometimes called dogs. Don't mess with Knox's friends, or he'll feed you to dogs. Or, he'll take you to his kennel, 'cause you're his bitch now.

"I'm lit like John Wick, I could kill you with a pencil, ay"

John Wick was a character in a movie, who could kill (or killed?) someone with a pencil. I had to google the movie's name, it's apparently also called John Wick. I haven't seen it, I'm not an action film fan, but I've heard of the scene in the movie. Knox is writing rap bars that kill you, so he's also killing you with a pencil. I googled if John Wick was ever on fire (lit), and he was not, but he lit something on fire. "Lit" also means smart, Knox is smart. And the string of a candle is called a wick.

"Now imagine me broke, deep in a hole, where my knees won't go, try and reach rope as I sink low, when I bleed my woes/wounds, but the peace/piece my hope try to reach my foes"

The knees one took me a while! I only now got it when I started to think about it! I think, I hope, that I got it, anyway... Knox grew up quite poor, in a neighborhood with lots of gang violence. He was good at sports and got a scholarship to a university and didn't end up in a gang. Instead he got an education and started his sports career. Then he suffered an injury, or multiple injuries, that meant he had to quit his sports career. He decided to make rapping his new career. It didn't start easy, though - he was selling CDs on the streets, etc. He was poor again. And mentally in a deep hole, depressed. His knees won't go, because of the injury/injuries. He's trying to reach a rope to pull himself out of the hole, because his legs aren't carrying him anymore. I can't help but to also picture himself thinking about hanging himself, because he was so down... He has mentioned having these thoughts, but never goes into detail about the methods.
Wounds bleed. Might be a reference to cutting (self harming).
He's bleeding his woes, his depressive thoughts, on a paper.
Trying to reach his foes, the big label rappers.

"Hated for my skin tone, tinted/tainted as an Em clone, how could they explain it - I was only ever painting what I've known"

White rappers get shit sometimes, just because they were inspired by the biggest white rapper of that time / of all time, Eminem. Tint means pretty much the same as shade, but I think it only applies to black and white. It's a certain version of the same color, anyway. Like skin tone. Skin tone is skin tone, we all just have a different tint of it. But Knox is only painting what he knows - his life, his experiences... and yes, those experiences include Em being pretty much the only white rapper making it big, and Knox looking up to him. But that's not all there is. Paint also has tones and tints, so there's that double.

"I've been low, but the way I earned through this pain/pane, a window"

Low, like depressed.
Low on cash, but earning more money.
A window pane, the glass screen of a window.
He was depressed, but he went through the pain / window pane and got in, through the window. In a metaphorical sense, a window is an opportunity. He got a change, he took it, and got in.

"The government be tappin the phone is all trackin / track and control, got a map on your home (?)"

They do. Many governments know many things about their citizens. I think big corporations know even more, but anyway.

" is way back when they push the LSD"

I don't know. But sure. He knows something I don't. Can't wait for him to tell me in words I understand ;D Lol.

 "and smack the black person that's trapped in a hole/whole"

Knox was in a deep hole, and now the black person is in a hole.
The government is beating a person that is already down, and this is probably also a bar against police brutality. 

"(???) conscience push the cocaine, if you'll track and they'll spend it, they use the cold war to wear mask and offenders, harass (?) and then they had the nerve to claim a crack epidemic?"

Again, I need Knox to break this down for me. Did the government bring drugs to the country, spread them around, and then arrest the people with the drugs? That's what it sounds like. And I think Steen1 (a Finnish rapper) had similar bars about the Finnish government in his song Sinisiä rappuja ja punaisia hintalappuja. Black people were not the target, but poor people. But there was a similar concept there.

"But fuck being woke"

Generally speaking, I disagree, but he's referencing the previous and the next bar, so I'mma let this one pass. Fuck being (fake) woke, like "oh, I may be white, but I, like, totally understand what black people are talking about and where they're coming from, because I also grew up poor and bla bla bla", instead of letting black people speak for themselves. He's saying fuck that, he's not claiming he knows what it's actually like to be a black person in America. And the next bar, about sleeping vs. being woke/awake.

"they still sleepin on me, like the Poe(?) in the streets"

Idk who is this Poe sleeping on the streets, but Edgar Allan Poe has a poem called The Sleeper.
To "sleep on" someone means, in this context, that they don't realize how great Knox is.

"so I scroll through these beats, phone charged 'til I find another bone to release"

In the video, he takes out his phone and scrolls it. He's finding a beat to rap to, to release a song, luring the sleeping dogs in like the song's a bone, so they'd stop sleeping on him.

"fuck em (?) and em (?), I'm a roax(?) in a heat"

The what and what now?

"who you know pennin' me?"

Knox writes his own bars. 100% of them. No one else does it for him. No ghost writers here (btw, is that why he has the ghost merch? if yes, then I just got that).

"I don't beef, I just eat, this is what I excrete"

To have beef with someone is to not get along with someone.
He's not doing that, though, since the other guy is not even getting a chance. Knox is eating them alive (like Jeffrey Dahmer, although I think he killed them first..., and picking them out of his teeth with dental floss).
And beef is cattle/ox meat, which is a thing people eat.

"With the number two, spittin' any one or two piece and through are you fool sitting(?) what (?) I do, who?"

Number two can mean "shit". Shit can mean the truth, or something else worthwhile. Spitting can mean rapping. So he could be saying he's telling the truth, saying something important.
I don't get the rest, there's too many words missing.

"But where the fuck were you when we were suitin' up in the same corner where they were shootin up, pushin' dust in the cut, I was moving CDs with no love, tryna get a bus/bush/push and move it up"

I don't know, Knox. You haven't told us your age, so I don't know where I was when you were selling your CDs in the street corner. I probably existed, so I was probably in Finland.
Anyway, the bar is a reference to that time in Knox's life. Someone wasn't there for Knox, someone who could have been (someone who knew he existed, unlike me) and is now trying to reach him and collab or something. Or to claim they were always a fan of his. In these bars, he's talking about a street corner where people were doing drugs (shooting up, pushing dust in the cut, aka injecting the drugs). He was there, trying to sell his music, his CDs, but got rejected a lot (=with no love). The last bar is probably not a triple, he probably just meant "push". Instead of pushing drugs or shooting them up, he was trying to get a push for his music and his career and move up from the streets.

"And fuck the mainstream, I don't really see value with the ice and the whips that will only devalue, they sellin you a pill, you don't need to evaluate, put some fentanyl in you don't need to be bottled"

Fuck mainstream radio hip hop, basically. I sort of get it and sort of don't. It comes down to the debate of what is real art, how do you measure if a song is good, etc. Which song has more value: the one where every syllable rhymes with another one and where you rap so fast, bend so many words and have so many quadruple meanings that no one understands you anymore (and don't drop the lyrics...), or the big radio hit with a catchy hook about a crush they had on a girl that blows up on Tiktok overnight? Ever since I noticed that prog metal is making me find simpler music boring, I've tried my best not to judge the music. That music has it's time and place. It's not the music that's the problem, it's my brain. And to answer the question earlier, technically the first one is the better song. It takes more of those skills those people value most than the other song. But the second song is the one that blew up. That more people liked. The hook sounds nice and gets stuck in peoples' heads, the lyrics are simple and relatable, and people like that. Everyone feels weird and like no one understands them and when they momentarily find something that they relate to, they like it. It's that simple. (But then again, I understand how you can grow bitter when you see how songs you think should be on the radio, let alone your own songs, are not there and something you consider as not as good, is there. I 100% get it and often feel the same.)
Getting off my tangent now...
At first I thought the "ice and the whips" was a song reference (and it might be?), but then I realized "ice" can also mean diamond jewelry, and googled "whips slang" and apparently that means cars. Explains the steering wheel motion he did in the video. Knox doesn't see the value in making songs about bling and cars, superficial topic like that. Just like the bling and the cars, the songs' value will go down over time, they won't matter in the long run. Unlike his songs, which are about deeper topics.
Again, when he says "they sellin you a pill", I think he's talking to us. Those songs are selling us a pill, an easy pill to swallow in this case, but it's like drugs, you get hooked on the hooks. Knox's pills may be hard to swallow but at least you're not lured in for a quick and easy fix. Heck, it took me about an hour or two to even get the lyrics on a written form and then, I've been thinking about this song almost all day today and then, been writing this post for like 4-5 hours now (I started around 5-6pm, I think the release time will even be that time, so, you can check there... and it's 9.43pm now).
Fentanyl is an opioid that is used as an anesthetic, and also as a drug, but it kills you very easily. I read the Wikipedia article (in Finnish) of how it's misused, and here are a few observations I made: It literally takes your breath away, that's how you die. It makes you feel euphoric. It's used as a doping on horses. So, the mainstream hiphop music gets you hooked, makes you feel good, takes your breath away, but it kills you. And also, he had the golden horse Zelda bars earlier, which can be tied here as well. They're a scam, these mainstream artists.
I'm not sure if there's a double in the "bottled" bar, probably yes, but the only thing I get is a pill bottle.

"Stay free and in the tenants(?), they sell you all this racket, but I ain't in the (?), still it fits in the room and these donkeys in the tennis(?) but I ain't voting any, I'm independent."

Idk. He's independent. I got that. I'm getting tired and I don't know who are the donkeys in the tennis something and why is Knox not voting any.

"Hey, do what you love, man! And fuck anyone who tells you you can't!
Killshot to the labels, I'm out."

He's not dissing the artists, though? If he's saying this to the mainstream artists. That they should keep doing what they do, but fuck the record labels. He's staying out of the vote, out of the labels and leaving this conversation and this song here.
And he said "labels", not "record labels", so he could mean other kinds of labels as well. That might be a stretch, though, so I'm not going there...

___________

Ps. I was wrong about the posting time, it put in the time I finished. But I saw the time I started breaking this down, it was 5:50pm. I went away, to see Ian Taylor's reaction video, but when Knox got to the Baba Yaga bars, I realized I forgot to dissect those, so I paused and came back... Then I went through my post again and fixed a few things and that took me another 20min. Now it's 10:39pm. Almost 5 hours of breaking down (after slowly digesting it for about 23 hours before that). This is why I don't have a YouTube channel.