Nebuchadnezzar

Broken glass on cracked and open asphalt Depression rolls in waves over the city like a cancer Pity we can’t scream round here, whisper is too massive Five-o on the sidelines cheering the game like it’s a mascot Hundred to zero between the haves and the have nots You don’t get respect on the ave unless you bag rocks A rap sheet will get you mixed and mastered with no ass cop Cause royalties are non-existent if you living on the fast block Birds are celebrated, corpses melinated And red and blue on opposite sides of the color gradient So don’t you cross the lines if you ain’t got your weight up You hungry but these youngins out here starving for the paper Greet you with that piece like as-salamu alykum You bow down and pray to the day you don’t meet your maker You’re stressing, highly unfavored, seems like survival’s outdated Expired with no recall but we all dying to save it out in Babylon Out here in Babylon We struggling out in Babylon This is real talk Portrayers don’t impress much Live on your Channel 4 will make you lose your breakfast So you remove your outrage and stay with familiar networks Cause a man’s life is so much less important than his net worth Steak and champagne, rosay and lobster Clean lines of cocaine to numb what you can’t process Reality is fabricated, purated, and boxed up And sold on your TV so you can see the boogey monsters Ignorance is bliss, it’s so cliché but rather fitting Instead of righteous deaths, they’d rather make a savage living Eighty-five percent of them is average, basic really Flossing chains and whips like modern slaves, ironically Pretty comes in compacts, watch us all with the nightfall Dirty tapes turn a relative eyesore into an icon Truth don’t get you paid so lies will play like hands of cards Too hard to believe? Why don’t you scroll through my Nikon, out here in Babylon Out here in Babylon We struggling out in Babylon The scene’s a battleground: battered faces, tattered gowns All the world’s a stage so play your part and keep the chatter down Ghetto birds circling in the skies and pigs are scattered round And they wonder why you go animal when the camera’s out of bounds Big Brother’s watching you Get too flipped, they’ll coffin you Too much Libya, out of luck, they’ll Muammar al-Gaddafi you Got you in between a rock and a hard place, a crappy view And all the usual suspects like nappy hair and a blackened hue Now the dream’s a nightmare and you too scared to face it, huh You not trying to go back to the dark past that you made it from Came from ashy to classic and now you think the sky’s the limit Grew from litter to Malcolm X, public enemy number one Suddenly you see the smoke and mirrors out your middle eye Then you see the mothership up in the bullet-riddled sky Count your blessings, count your crimes, lose your taste for apple pie Then new veils come falling down: who’s more freer, you or I? In Babylon Out here in Babylon We struggling out in Babylon