[Verse 1] We were working on a mixtape Now your in my memory with a Magic Jersey and a thizz face Jordans on your feet, clenched fists on the table Where you mimicked each beat bass popping through Ableton Pounding every 808, tickling every hi hat You couldnt freestyle rap but your charisma hijacked The cypher and I find that my freestyles are quite wack Without your adlibs reverberating the climax How do you remember someone whose gone When memory disintegrates in trembling fog? Cuz your beats I still have sound like ghosts escaping speakers And Im on your facebook just to puzzle your facial features Together but pixelated perceptions are not authentic When the joy you made contagious is no longer infectious Mental marionettes I cant lose you in small talk If i carry your death, the burden will make my heart stop [Hook] My hearts behind these bars this is cardiac arrest This is cardiac arrest [Verse 2] Hiphop began as an expression of oppression Subversive with a purpose, a lesson and a message When blacks represented as killers on TV Rap was opportunity to view them creatively But then Viacom and MTV, decided to commercialize the industry Its a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how they keep from going under The siege of prison industrial complex, perennial process, to keep the colors in shutters distract you with bomb threats And 90 percent of what we watching is controlled by six media conglomerates who pocket what is profited And they have stocks within the hiphop market and the margins of the private prison complex, now Im vexed So whats lucrative? rappers intellectuality, or these gangsta rappers who endorse criminality The medias attempt at constructing a reality, but really its financially enamoring a fantasy And hammering insanity inside of our morality, the prosecutors knocking with a lock em up mentality Tryna vandalize and sanitize minds, while shows like Law Order just romanticize crime The black and brown people portrayed as drug dealers, when majority of drugs are consumed by white people And 2.3 million people are in prison 5.1 are under correctional supervision So theyre dropped into a dark abyss hard to be an optimist when they cops find em hop skotchin lock em and stop and frisk This is a wake up call to not forget Chicago deaths To every Oakland kid who lost his breath on project steps We find the crisis then twerk around it like Miley Cyrus When its easier to get a gun than a drivers license And Im living in a bubble an internal shell If I got charged for battery I cant endure a cell Get it? Charged, battery, Duracell But my bars arent important when these steel bars burn in hell [Hook] [Verse 3] Blasting off like an astronaut This is the story of teaching at Juvenile hall We drove past golf courses and suburbs To law forces and shutters, from Hogwarts to the gutter Tried to come in without a preconceived design So I could peep it, seep it up, and reconstruct my mind At first we were met by silence An ambivalence, with mean mugs defending their shyness Nervous that their writing wasnt spoken outspokenly I told em theres no bouldering between rap and poetry Then we had that Cypher in the corner They told me I was gassin em, a natural performer Felt good being told Im a fire MC But little did they know they were inspiring me Prisons maintained so privately While their feelings restrained so privately His poem from the perspective of a black Camaro During a drive by, I felt it in my bone marrow But he ripped it up and kicked the dust as if wed frown upon it Wish he knew that his reality was valid as a sonnet But the censorship is endless made to feel like their expression is identified As senseless desensitized and helpless To gentrify the images thats put in their brains And I tried to empathize but I couldnt relate Hes 17 with 2 kids and 15 with 2 nines Im 19 with 16s, that cant reach their true lives They asked me bout college and I paint them a scene Salivating over freedom that had came in a dream Glossy distant eyes visualizing a different life If they switched the glitch and tides when impulses improvised Internalized their fist of pride till open palms itch at night Blaming themselves when their clipped inside the systems lies What is crime? I didnt see it in his eyes writing letters to a son that yet to materialize What is crime? I didnt find it in the smile of a boy whose tear ducts are duct taped by denial I guess my missions to split em with lyricism rid em from mental prism give lenses for better vision whose ending this bitter schism injecting my criticism tried to diagnose the problem its limitless but dont give in, listen
prison, privately, em, whose, shutter