no socks, stick forts and pine needles
I roam, without payin for it
a sagitarian
in your home
forest creatures, aware of this new beast
gossipin
while i’m blossomin like Maurice Sendak over beats
occasional tweets
of blue birds on my shoulder
the birds are real in this cartoon though
and I done climbed a lot of trees to get here
sounds and colors so clear
the waterfront dive, a tear
nickel highs and skies of blue
Frazier and Disney, I can waltz to this tune
black jokes and green fumes
red dirt and red man tombs, extermination
grows dark yellow in the afternoon
blood hungry birds ate my crumbs
no way back to where I came from
so happy here I can hear the drums
short shrift, fo fum
get this sick moskvich a thermometer
your sapogi best not step to me
unless you get a pedometer
hope vladimir brought his shagomer
cause i’m an ice cold cubo futurist hit man
and my ice pick stick from kazan to here
fuck the atmosphere
lets blast this tajik weed like baikonomyr
hangin way up now in the corner, iconic
ironically they said im unorthodox
they aint feelin me cause I refuse to wear socks with birkenstocks
I eat my bloody buckwheat in reeboks
my muddy feet still kick like a beat box
knees lock as I step back for a clear shot,
like the fugees in vladivostok
rhymes hit you out of earshot
So many hollywood mcs
from welton academies, getting buried
like a dead poet cemetary
I slam boots, party secretaries
20,000 entirely different leagues, you underwater
fuck your alma mater, I’m walkin on the moon like Gordon Sumner
Knock boots, kutsu, cahoots
this shit ain’t for googles and loot
it’s for giggles and poots
Jones got me on the edge but that boat propeller don’t bother me
My soul is prepared, clique tight like the priory
i’m joint chiefin and stayin quiet
like peter pace
my competition is ephemeral I don’t lose face
my trailer parked ozark
I will always have a base
don’t do it for the grammar
i just do it for my mammaw
to stay out the slamma
eat chow chow with my ham and find a bad mamma jam
and…. i’m…….
They got a great wall all we got is wall street
a billion hungry bellies and they all wanna eat
black president but he still aint free
from Black Rock to Gold Man they still elite
So it’s time to do the math like Rakim and B
Robbed us of the vote now all we got is a tweet
so take the streets back ya’ll vote with ya feet
straw in a needle stack
needle broke the camel’s back
we like a bad omen
for fat cats and white old men
99 and one
ask ya dead masta where the strength come from
so experienced and so damn young
the math ya’ll
yo I aint the first to deliver the message
Grandmaster Erik B and Jeru wrote the preface
It goes back to the days of the fall of Rome
You wanna conquer the world
but you broke ya own home
Fuck man, everywhere I look
it’s Brutus and Judas and Captain Hook
Killin kids’ dreams faster than a crack fiend
is no sleep better than that dream?
Wake up America, recognize the time,
History don’t repeat itself, it rhymes
I got rhymes like dimes and nickels you rap like tommy pickles
met a girl outside penn station said can I borrow five dollars so I can call my kids?
I said i’ll give you ten if you can prove that they exist she said who that is
so I gave it to her with southern diction
i’m half of jules and vin from pulp fiction
i’m jules and jim from a classic french film
used to be juice and gin but now i’m juelz and jim
from fred doug to doug fresh to sugar hill i spit poems
like a white lil kim but not fem
enine, like a black eminem without valium
now she know the ozark valley i’m in
and you know how the rest played
like madison square i’m lookin over there
wishin she was out my hair and she had welfare
but she spent it elsewhere
save the fuckin story i’m the fuck up outta here
[intro - screwed]
Why that mothafucka always scratchin his deck?
cause that mothafucka’s ill and he scratch like zizek
But why that mothafucka scratch all the time?
cause a sick mothafucka like me sposed to rhyme
so why you need a dj like zizek to rhyme?
so mothafucka’s like you don’t forget the time
hey yo
isn’t that like the guy that like…
I don’t know man
oh yeah like
look it up in the back of Violence or something man I don’t know
hmmm, it says lujubbliana
yeah right
here, mix this shochu with that juice
this spice is giving me a headache dude
me too man.
anyway the other night once again, surrounded by asian chicks
and I couldn’t quite tell what was real and an illusion
but we threw darts like it was innocent
I felt that old thrill of the hunt kickin in
I hated lyin, not a real player, too soft
but sometimes these broads find that spot and I had to change it up
told em we can go to the club if both of yall is cool with stayin up
could a blown like 5 days with the both of them
instead I was out of the karaoke booth by 6 am
but on to bigger worser things
reasonin aint functioning my logic fucked up that ring
pistoning, a real hard worker, you could say a gardener
cause I spent all night underground workin with plants
givin broke mothafuckas a chance to revamp on uncle sam
reason I hate my green eggs
goose goose tycoons got me down here smokin on regs
while they up around 70 and spreadin legs
true equaliza is pfiza not the feds
it’s funny bred, if they came from Bed I wouldn’t wanna see em dead
meanwhile everybody obsessed with frequency, recency
when what they really need is decency and delinquency
if everybody gave their bills more time to bleed
maybe then we could destroy the culture
that says if we CAN do it, we supposed to
remote controlled vultures
teenage targets in the dessert, bloody wedding dresses
and theres no fuckin war that makes that right
like paula schultz six feet can’t keep us from makin right might
blow up like the world trade? if that rhyme was made in this decade
big man be deaded twice you can bet that on ya life
cause the only thing that make it on huffpost and o’rye
is the next explosion, good designs and lower case i’s
cover’s blown, I’m gonna need a new disguise
scratch like zizek, then let it spin a couple times
[intro repeat]
Why that mothafucka always scratchin his deck?
cause that mothafucka’s ill and he scratch like zizek
But why that mothafucka scratch all the time?
cause a sick mothafucka like me sposed to rhyme
so why you need a dj like zizek to rhyme?
so mothafucka’s like you don’t forget the time
[sample]
“they’re vegetarians.” “They’re what?
“they’re vegetarians.” “They’re what?”
“they’re vegetarians” “They’re what?”
“degenerates, they will turn into monkeys”
alright give me another try
the motion of the ocean if the ocean was shallow
ok I move like a horse and my complexion sallow,
but neither am I hung up
how many mc’s would put that shit up front
born that way so I gotta be proud as fuck
don’t care
put em in the air, the shit in my care look like care bares wrapped in plastic
candy rain at the end of my pot
of gold that’s soul for real and not one song sold
proud as hell of that
don’t need a plaque, just a girl with fantasy potential
fuck white rappers with no mental who try to prove
of course I know who you about to accuse
if I don’t care who listens you can’t tell me I lose
so swallow that skittle ass criticism
while I hit another smidgin of this mary poppins
and you dig the witicisms i’ve recently been droppin
bitches smoke on our chalices fall through ceilings like alices
I aint no shaft, i’m more like ernest
it’s like a jungle sometimes, I’m feeling like Mogley
behind your back like Ginobili
you can never control me
degenerates, eat more turkey
The word “verno” sunk its piles into my brain long before I knew its meaning. Was it me, or did people’s voices drop ever so slightly when this word crossed their lips (emphasis on the first syllable, the vowel is somewhere between ier in ‘tier’ and ear from ‘to tear’). I sensed in verno something that predated my attempts to learn a second tongue, there was something about it that went back to my first attempts to mimic the sounds of my surroundings. As a word, verno seemed a kind of incontrovertible truth, a verdict whose usage seemed preordained by time and fate. I hesitated to even look it up. The time would come, I thought, and I would know to use it. Words like faithful; true; right; correct; accurate; exact; safe; sure; reliable; and certain had their places, but they were so subordinate to context, so papery and lifeless compared to this venerable Russian modifier. After twelve years of studying Russian, it was just the other day that I realized why my reverence for this word ran so deep. There is a sort of Belfastian peace wall that keeps proper nouns and (improper?) nouns from hurling paving stones at one another. I’ve always wondered about this division, and how it affects our attempts to learn another language. Proper nouns, like the names of brands, cities and family members, are in a sense common linguistic property. We don’t normally ‘try’ to remember them because we don’t need to, they’re sticky as hell, and often lead to disputes with serious political/economic consequences that are very boring. As a way to break the extended tedium of studying a foreign language, however, it’s kind of nice when somebody hands you a swag bag of proper nouns that translate themselves effortlessly. What happened in my case, with verno, was just the opposite. I had nothing to go on, no leads. Like a beat cop trying to solve an international conspiracy, I faced the problem of jurisdiction, but enjoyed the luxury of anonymity. What good could tracking a word back to its roots do when those roots were not my own? I went gumshoeing through the whole of the Russian language only to discover that this word is really pretty common, in fact it’s a little dull, and my reverence for it was more self-induced than anything else. A dead end. It was only the other day, when I was drunk enough to clamber up the wall separating the titled classes from their common brethren that I realized what this word meant for me. I started thinking, “If verno was a brand of deodorant, would I buy it?” (yes, definitely, I’m in Japan now on another linguistic journey and could go for a stick of Sure) [CS - I looked this up, it’s marketed as Rexona in Russia/CIS]. Then, “If verno was an English word, what would it remind me of? Of course, my dad, Vernon!” I realized. All I had to do was reject the distinction between proper and common, noun and modifier, and as these distinctions vanished I realized why this word was so significant. A bridge formed between what I had hitherto considered the Russian English parts of my brain. How soon do people learn their parents’ names? I don’t know, but it’s got to be pretty deep down in the primordial muck of linguistic development, strange that I didn’t group these in with the other propers. I guess there are proper nouns and proper nouns.
