The Roots - Little Ghetto Boy (Prelude) lyrics

rate me

<span class="feat">(with John Legend, feat. Malik Yusef)</span>

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<i>[Malik Yusef]</i>

You know you ghetto boy, when you got a face, with a scar

And yo' highest aspirations is a place, and a car

Shorties pull out and bussssst, like a money shot

Now he on the run, he hot

And he hurtin his Granny and she the only one he got

The hood so shady

You give up hope, of ever even tryin to find a sunny, spot-

-light, they caught him at the stop-

-light, but if he woulda run that yellow

Then he coulda, run the globe

But insteed, with speed

They put one in the middle of his frontal, lobe

like a unicorn

I'm just tryin to keep you, informed

To my little ghetto soldiers in they, gold

green, red, and blue uni-forms - chuuch!

But I'm feeling like the loneliest monk

So I pull me a Thelonius Monk and blew, the horn

And we don the monikers of goons and gangsters

And are trained to conduct ourselves true, to form

So we add a Shorty, a Money, a Mack

A Lil', a Eazy, or a Young to our name

So all the big ballers grab rims and hung, in the game

And there's a degree, of difficul-ty

to make it from the ghetto boy into the man-hood

Especially when you know that yo' fresh greens

will help eliminated a canned, good

Can, good, and bad co-exisssst?

In a place with plenty of off ramps but no ex-its

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