It has also been stated that the album honours the hip-hop group Public Enemy. On the song "Wretches and Kings", Shinoda stated "There is a homage to Chuck D on there. It's probably the most hip-hop song on the record and one of the most aggressive... Public Enemy were very three-dimensional with their records because although they seemed political, there was a whole lot of other stuff going on in there too. It made me think how three-dimensional I wanted our record to be without imitating them of course, and show where we were at creatively." The first line of the first and second verse ("To save face, how low can you go?" and "So keep face, how slow can you go?") are references to one of Public Enemy's most famous songs "Bring The Noise", which open its first verse with "Bass! How low can you go?" in a melodically similar way. The album also features speech samples by American political figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mario Savio.