The sky’s the Limit
By Walidah Imarisha
The unfinished revolution
Borne of the streets
Blood pours down the concrete
In turn
Birthing tracks in a studio
Laid down on wax.
Manifesting tell-tell stories,
Duplicating and recreating
The entire color spectrum.
Visions of the Brown Berets
Haunted by the CIA,
Undulating vibrating penetrating
The beat masturbating to itself
And in turn inseminating segments of the population
Vietcong guerrilla commando fighting style,
Staggering through a mind field
Caught unawares
Kamikaze situations
Night falls
Belly crawls through the tall grass.
Looped it with an SP 1200
Like the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Clearing out the stale empty posturings
Of this almost lost
Or perhaps a lost and found generation.
Turn the station
And find static.
The tell-lie-vision spews me back at myself
In stereo surround sound
Surrounded
Fast closing in
Hit the dirt or assume the position,
Makes no difference.
Do not attempt to control us
Because we are in control of the control
Ciphering with the speed of a raised fist
Like this was the 68 Olympics.
And we’re bombing cities and bombing buildings
Spraypaint aerosol warfare
Twist off the top
Never stopped
To read the hand writing on the wall.
With blood in my eye
George Jackson resurrected
But to be corrected by the department of corrections
Is akin to being overruled by empty objections.
Cause for pause
Being Mumia Abu-Jamal
Still sitting in a cell.
Who volunteers for a trip to the jungles of Chiapis?
The print of the Zapitistas mark me
And with sully on my forehead
I can’t hope to stop this.
Increase the insurrection
Attica Attica
Turntables spin with the prestige of a mack 10
More or less deadly
And we become the repository for chains left
Unbroken.
The beat drops
And the mic slinks through these streets
Twisting around this nation’s larynx
Sanity cracks
Strange fruit
Hanging from Detroit lampposts
Hypercrossed like stars
And a load too heavy to be laid down
Drowns out the silent screams of burning Buddhist monks
And revolutionary shot dead while they slept
And children who’ve never wept
And thanks to modern tricknology,
They are mass marketed
Circumcised and commodified for a larger audience.
And bebop is lost
And g-rock is king
And emcees talk about
Ayo, I rock the mic like Malik el-Shabazz
Dropping bombs like this was Vietnam…
But do you really?
You might rock the mic like Fidel Castroooooooo…
But if you a counterrevolutionary
Then COINTELPRO incineraries got Castro
Rolling over in his soon to be grave.
Fuck the DAT machine
Che Guevara stalking through the hills
But without making moves
Movement is lost
As are you.
Culture vultures perch on warheads
Waiting to drop something on your head
And you talk about how this mic here is sacred
But you desecrate and defecate on the holy shrine of our ancestors
Talking bout
Straight from the hip or the shoulder
But when Huey Newton slipped
Who caught him?
Uncle Sam
With arms wide open.
Burrowing down into the belly of the beast
Underground
Ripping from the inside out until I can breathe
Finally understanding the powers that be are terrified
Because
WE BE THE POWER
And if I play this track backwards
Voices scream for more than apple pie
Or a cabin in the sky
But I decide to just
Let
It
Drop…
And the record is not over yet
The record is not over yet
The revolution is not over yet.