# No Fake Friends > **One-line reading.** A survivor counts the people who vanished when he had nothing, builds a list so it can never be un-remembered, then outclimbs the wound instead of healing it — and you can hear the exact moment wonder turns into a security system. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (2018) — **track 8 of 13** · styled *N.F.F. (No Fake Friends)* > **Written by** Roy English, Matt Pauling & S1 (Larry Griffin Jr.) · **Produced by** Roy English, Matt Pauling & S1 (exec. producer S1) > **Mixed by** Jeff Ellis · **Mastered by** Chris Gehringer · Atlantic > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxVBfKyvlY0) ## At a glance - **Era / release** — *Subject to Flooding* (2018), the debut Roy famously *"had no money to make,"* built piecemeal across Joshua Tree, Florence, Haiti, Ireland and Lake Arrowhead. Atlantic redistributed the album in 2019. - **In one line** — a poverty-and-abandonment song that hardens, in real time, into a doctrine of who gets let in. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]], first-person and openly autobiographical. No character mask yet: this is years before [[Sir Lucius]] has a name. But it's the survival-self that will *become* him doing the talking. - **Key symbols** — the List · the flattened [[The Moon|stars]] of the Hollywood Walk of Fame · the radar · the backpack that holds an entire life. ## The song, mapped The argument runs **wound → vow, twice, then piles the vow higher.** Two verses do opposite things — one sinks, one soars — but the pre-chorus between them never changes a word. That fixed hinge is the whole point: the success in verse two orbits a wound it never lands on. | Section | Short of it | What the beat does | |---|---|---| | **Verse 1 — collapse** | *"sleeping on the sidewalk / no money, no car,"* everything owned in a backpack; *"Hollywood I had the night watch / looked down at my stars."* | Establishes literal homelessness, then delivers the album's most quietly devastating image — the Walk of Fame stars *under* the sleeping body (see below). Closes *"never had an option to fallback / but now I'm offtrack."* | | **Pre-chorus — the wound + the archive** | *"where did my friends go when i had nothing? … I made a list and I kept all the names to remember that."* | Disbelief before accusation — then memory-keeping. **This pre-chorus is identical both times.** It is the constant the song is built around. | | **Chorus — the vow** | *"I don't want no fake friends around me … (I don't want any)"* ×2 | Grief converts to policy. Exclusion, stated as a rule. | | *♪ Fake Friends* | — | Interlude ad-lib; the hinge between the two halves. | | **Verse 2 — escape + ascent** | *"hopping over fences / Ann Morrison Park"; "always hated school so I dropped out / I'm taking off now"; "they ain't even on my radar"; "Bali with the fam for the New Year / I'm seeing so clear."* | Outsider backstory rockets into success imagery. Note the cruelty of the arc: as status climbs, emotional distance *widens*. The clarity is a filtered clarity — he sees clearly *because* the perimeter tightened. | | **Pre-chorus — repeat** | *(same wound, same list)* | The money arrived. The wound didn't move. | | **Chorus — extended** | the vow ×3 | Where the first chorus said it twice, this one says it three times — the perimeter *piling up*, hardening as the song ends. | | *Fake Friends* | — | Closing ad-lib. | That structure isn't decoration; it *enacts* the reading. V1 is the fall, V2 is the flight, and the unmoved pre-chorus is the tell — **he recovers altitude, not trust.** > [!tip] One lowercase letter is doing real work > On streaming the wound is rendered *"where did my friends go when **i** had nothing?"* — small *i*. Read generously, that diminished pre-success self is still the one narrating, even now that the *"fam,"* the Bali trip and the clear vision have arrived. The catch: it depends on the lyric rendering, which isn't identical across every platform — so treat the small-*i* flourish as a lovely possibility, not a load-bearing fact. ## What it means **It is not, first, a song about enemies. It's a song about discovering that belonging was conditional.** The emotional center is disbelief — *where did my friends go?* sounds confused before it sounds vengeful. There's still grief here, not yet the hardened cynicism the same instinct curdles into later. The rejection of "fake friends" reads less as a flex than as someone trying to survive a relational collapse without coming apart. **The list is an archive before it's a weapon.** *I made a list and I kept all the names to remember that* is, first, an anti-erasure device: abandonment happened, and memory will not be quietly rewritten to make it hurt less. People who come through social collapse become archivists before they become gatekeepers — preservation of what was seen comes first, and only later hardens into radar, hypervigilance and access control. Its origin is grief, not strategy. **"They ain't even on my radar" is a deeper move than rejection.** Rejection still grants the other person a place — as a threat, as a *no*. *Not on my radar* denies them even that. It doesn't say *you're out*; it says *you don't register.* The excluded aren't enemies. They're erased from attention altogether. **"Seeing so clear" is clarity weaponized.** The Bali-with-the-fam clarity feels like enlightenment, but it's a bought one: vision sharpens because the field of view got smaller. This is the survival-self's oldest trick — selling *filtration* as *insight*, discernment-against dressed up as sight-toward. And the tragedy sits right in the architecture: the wound never gets repaired, it gets **outclimbed.** The song ends in altitude — the list working, the perimeter holding, the plane taking off — but *altitude is not the same thing as home.* It's the same orbit-without-return shape as [[Good Day]]'s travel itinerary: a relational wound converted into geographic motion that circles forever and never comes back down. > [!note] A fair objection, kept on the table > "Real friends versus fake friends" is one of the most common post-come-up themes in all of pop and hip-hop — *I know who was really there* is practically a genre requirement. So a flatter reading is legitimate: this is a well-made version of a standard *new-money* anthem, co-written with two collaborators, and the elaborate psychology below is an overlay on a near-universal sentiment. There's a second, kinder objection too — that the song frames **healthy boundaries**, not pathology. You don't reconcile with people who were *fake*; maybe the absence of reconciliation is the point, not the wound. Both are held here, and they keep the more elaborate reading honest. ## Characters - **[[Roy]]** — first-person, autobiographical, pre-Lucius. The man on the sidewalk keeping the list, addressing absent friends who aren't in the room to answer. - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — does **not** appear in the song; no Lucius exists in 2018. But this is the survival-self that eventually calcifies into him — and years later, in the theatrical [[The Interview|Roy v Lucius]] series, Lucius weaponizes *this exact wound.* Cornering Roy over money, he sneers that *"having a mansion, a house, even a studio apartment at this point would be a start…"* The scarcity recorded here is what gives that bargain its bite. - **"The fam"** — named in the Bali line; the new, trusted inner circle that replaces the friends who left. The *inside* of the perimeter. - **The absent "fake friends" / the names on the list** — never individuated. Which raises a real question: does the list ever appear as content — actual names, actual betrayals — or is it always referenced from the outside, a closed ledger we're told about but never shown? ## Symbols - **The List** — *"I made a list and I kept all the names."* Archive before weapon: grief preserved as memory, then hardened into filtration logic, radar, access control. - **The flattened stars** — the Walk of Fame stars *underfoot* while he sleeps on concrete. Transcendence collapsed into pavement; wonder converting into surveillance. Part of a catalogue-wide arc where the star migrates from sky to soul (below). - **Night watch** — *"Hollywood I had the night watch."* Not gazing up in wonder; scanning. The receptive faculty militarized into vigilance. - **The radar** — *"they ain't even on my radar."* Perimeter awareness; people erased from attention itself. - **The backpack** — *"everything I owned in a backpack."* A whole life compressed into one portable container. - **The sidewalk** — literal homelessness; the ground floor, the raw material plane with nothing above it. ## Connected songs - **[[Good Day]]** — the companion perimeter-track. *Good Day* armors the **mood** (*can't kill my vibe*); *No Fake Friends* armors **social access.** Both convert a relational wound into travel — Aspen and Paris there, Bali here — and both are orbit, never homecoming. They even share the post-scarcity origin (*"I had nothing"* on both). - **[[Loser]]** — the earlier adaptation. Where this song filters, *Loser* preempts: claim the low-status label first (*I'm a loser, baby*) so no one can wield it against you. Two faces of the same survival-self, both turning vulnerability into a survivable public posture. - **[[Hell Of A Night]]** — a fourth face of the same debut cluster: momentum-as-defense, outrunning collapse on pure velocity. - **[[Hell of a Night Pt. 2 (The Hallelujah Stickup)]]** — the same logic escalated past defense into outright seizure — and the song that closes a *fake / real* thread this one opens: three tracks after the fake-*detector*, *"fake it like your passport"* becomes a fake you *forge* to cross the border. - **[[Superhuman]]** — shares the velocity architecture: force and motion deployed to outrun psychic collapse. - **[[Move To You]]** — the star-arc neighbor. Track 7's *"even if the stars are out of place"* (navigation failing) sits *directly before* track 8's *"looked down at my stars"* (navigation abandoned, the stars now underfoot). - **[[Soul Is A Star]]** — the answer the catalogue eventually gives: *"your soul is a star,"* the star relocated *inward.* - **[[All My Friends]]** — resonant rather than direct: *"don't wanna go outside"* rhymes with this song's defensive filtration — when the world floods, the circle shrinks to the trusted few. - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — the crystallized end-state of the architecture this song helps build. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the Protector, and its three debut faces > *No Fake Friends* is the **third face of the debut's [[Concepts/The Protector|Protector]] cluster** — the survival intelligence that formed around early wounding to keep a hurt self functional. Read the three faces as one architecture wearing three masks: > > | Track | Face | What it defends | > |---|---|---| > | **Loser** (3) | Shame-preemption | claim the label before anyone can use it | > | **Good Day** (4) | Vibe-protection | armor-plate the high-mood state | > | **N.F.F.** (8) | **Social filtration** | list-keeping; exclusion as policy — who gets through | > > Loser guards *status*, Good Day guards *mood*, and *No Fake Friends* builds the **interpersonal interface**: the perimeter that decides who's admitted. (*Hell Of A Night* adds a fourth, momentum-as-defense.) All four are the same system — and [[Sir Lucius]] is what happens when they calcify into a single theatrical identity with a name. Note the through-line in the escape verbs, too: *"I'm taking off now"* sits right beside Good Day's *"I'm on a wave"* and Loser's *"wake up and I'm feeling fine"* — the debut's recurring **solution-by-momentum**, motion used as anesthetic. > > The lineage matters because it dissolves a tempting error: Lucius is **not** a hidden mastermind who was secretly running the early catalogue. He's the *accumulated crystallization* of perimeter-building behaviors first visible right here — abandonment, exposure, humiliation, hypervigilance — conditions that make the later split plausible, not a puppeteer pulling strings from the start. The visual lore even literalizes the origin: an image of a young Roy in toy plate-armor sits at the head of the chain *(childhood wound → the three debut armor-modes → Sir Lucius)*. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the stars, from sky to pavement to soul > *"Hollywood I had the night watch / looked down at my stars"* is point two of a **four-point arc** the catalogue draws across years — a steady devaluation of the *external* star and enthronement of the *internal* one: > > 1. **[[Move To You]]** (2018) — *"even if the stars are out of place."* Sky-navigation fails. > 2. **N.F.F.** (2018) — *"looked down at my stars."* The stars are now underfoot, walked on. > 3. **[[LOOP]]** (2025) — *"stars in the sky conspired."* The stars become a fate-trap. > 4. **[[Soul Is A Star]]** (2022) — *"your soul is a star."* The star relocated inward, where it can't be walked on. > > Stars are supposed to orient *upward* — navigation, wonder, soul-direction. Here he looks *down* at them. The heavens have effectively collapsed into pavement: destiny converted into infrastructure, the thing you'd steer by turned into the thing you sleep on. And he's on *night watch* — not gazing in awe but scanning for threats. That double conversion — stars to pavement, wonder to vigilance — is one of the defining gestures of *Subject to Flooding*: **the gradual militarization of receptive human faculties under prolonged instability.** > > Fair caution: the concrete image is autobiography (a body on the Walk of Fame), and *"the heavens collapsed into surveillance"* is the analyst's gloss layered over a literal memory. Beautiful, and coherent with the arc — but the memory is the ground floor and the cosmology is the reading. > [!note]- Advanced reading — Kabbalah, Jung, and the phenomenology of the perimeter > **Hermetic / Kabbalistic.** The song maps the pressure between the raw material plane (no money, no home, no stable body — [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life|Malkuth]]) and the **moon-layer** of memory, vigilance and emotional filtering ([[The Moon|Yesod]]). Under enough exposure, the psyche retreats *upward* into reflective, defensive structures; the "list" is a Yesodic security architecture, a moon-layer built to survive the ground floor. Crucially this is **adaptive, not evil** — the danger is only if protective reflection *permanently replaces* relational openness. The flattened-stars image is the same move in miniature: what should orient up toward the heart's solar meaning ([[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life|Tiferet]]) collapses down into commodified geometry underfoot. > > **Jungian.** This tracks the *beginning* of **persona hardening** under economic and social trauma — but it does *not* yet contain the fully autonomous theatrical intelligence of Lucius. It documents the *conditions*: abandonment, exposure, humiliation, conditional belonging, hypervigilance — the raw material a split is later built from. The tragedy is the classic one: a survival strategy that keeps running long after the danger it was built for has passed. > > **Existential / phenomenological.** The deepest destabilization isn't losing friends — it's the discovery that *belonging itself may be contingent* on utility, success and upward motion. Once that lands, reality tilts: friendship becomes uncertain, memory becomes *evidence*, perception becomes *defensive*, and ascent quietly replaces intimacy. The speaker survives by increasing altitude. But altitude is not the same thing as home. > > **Where this all lives in the system:** the active machinery here is [[Concepts/The Protector]], [[Concepts/Flattened Identity]] (turned outward — flattening *others* down to background noise) and social filtration; the phase is [[Concepts/Nigredo]] (the dark, dissolving ground); the state is *orbit*, not return. And the recurring surveillance vocabulary across the early catalogue — *night watch, radar, vibe, frame* — points at a unified concern this guide tracks under [[Concepts/Witnessing vs Surveillance]]: the difference between being *seen* and being *watched.* > [!note]- Advanced reading — the falsifier we keep pointed at ourselves > The honest self-check: **if *No Fake Friends* is simply a standard post-scarcity "I left the fake friends behind" flex** — emergent from a three-writer session, not encoded — **then the Protector-triad architecture is a beautiful overlay on a genre staple.** *I made a list… they ain't on my radar* really is among the most common sentiments in the form. We hold the elaborate reading *and* its falsifier at once; the boundary-setting counter above is where the pressure lands hardest, and it deserves its win. ## Lyrics ``` [Verse 1] I was sleeping on the sidewalk No money, no car Everything I owned in a backpack I had it like that Hollywood I had the night watch Looked down at my stars Never had an option to fallback But now I'm offtrack [Pre-Chorus] Where did my friends go when i had nothing? I remember that I made a list and I kept all the names to remember that [Chorus] I don't want no fake friends around me I don't want no fake friends (I don't want any) I don't want no fake friends around me I don't want no fake friends (I don't want any) ♪ Fake Friends [Verse 2] I was hopping over fences Ann Morrison Park Always hated school so I dropped out I'm taking off now Got me turning up my senses They ain't even on my radar Bali with the fam for the New Year I'm seeing so clear [Pre-Chorus] Where did my friends go when i had nothing? I remember that I made a list and I kept all the names to remember that [Chorus — extended] I don't want no fake friends around me I don't want no fake friends (I don't want any) I don't want no fake friends around me I don't want no fake friends (I don't want any) I don't want no fake friends around me I don't want no fake friends (I don't want any) Fake Friends ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, verified credits, public interviews).** The autobiography is explicit in the lyric — the sidewalk, the backpack, no money, no car. Credits are verified from streaming: written and produced by Roy English, Matt Pauling and S1, with S1 as executive producer, mixed by Jeff Ellis and mastered by Chris Gehringer, on Atlantic. Two paratexts are grounded: in [[The Interview]] (Roy vs. Sir Lucius), Lucius weaponizes the song's exact housing/financial wound; and in a public interview about the album, Roy names *No Fake Friends* by title as one of the record's genre "trials" — *"very different, extremely… my process of exploring who I am, and what Jagwar Twin is, bigger than me as an individual."* - **Strong readings.** The Protector-triad placement (a reading Roy's own 2019 press supports); the archive-before-weapon logic of the list; the flattened-stars → surveillance gesture; *he recovers altitude, not trust*; radar-as-erasure; the filtered-clarity read of *"seeing so clear."* All grounded in the material, but interpretive — and labeled as such. - **Framework (esoteric, syncretic — never claimed as authorial intent).** The Malkuth/Yesod/Tiferet mapping; the four-point star arc; the Jungian persona-hardening and phenomenological readings. The system *permits* these resonances; it doesn't assert Roy intends them. - **Open threads.** Does the list ever appear as *content* — named names, named betrayals — or only from the outside? Is *"i had nothing"* rendered with the lowercase *i* everywhere, or only on some platforms (the small-*i* reading depends on it)? And **Ann Morrison Park is in Boise, Idaho — not Los Angeles** — a concrete, unchased biographical anchor. Why Boise surfaces in an otherwise LA-coded song (a touring memory, someone's hometown, a childhood chapter) is a genuine lead nobody has run down. No claim, just a loose thread worth naming. ## Read next - [[Concepts/The Protector]] — the survival-self this song helps build; the full arc and its self-sabotage paradox. - [[Good Day]] — the companion perimeter-track; mood-armor to this song's social-armor. - [[Loser]] — the shame-preemption face of the same instinct. - [[Subject to Flooding]] — the debut album this belongs to, and the flood it's named for. - [[Sir Lucius]] — where all of this is headed once the perimeter grows a face. - [[Soul Is A Star]] — the star, finally relocated inward.