Cali Story
Verse 1
I was raised on the block
learned everything from a street by the name of Sinbad
where it's harder to get your hands on a book,
then your hands on a 10 sack,
and cats let their pants sag
and die over red and blue rags
and bullets fly past, ready to crash dreams
of innocent newborns and pre-teens.
The homeless fiend tokes a newport
the smoke he exhales foretells
the future of an ex-con fresh from jail,
it's cloudy
youngsters locked in county
they spend more on prison than schools to imprison me in my surroundings.
Where you from?
Cali-for-nia
where folks try to go Hollywood end up dead in the back of a dark alley. Another dream deferred
running in black jeans and nike cortez from a ghetto bird,
it's where I heard a pops tell his son,
"when you see them cops you run
arm yourself with handguns, semis, and shotguns
to save your life
because they got 3 strikes and prop 21."
We live fast and die young
10 years old with a cell phone mistaken for a gun
that's where I come from.
Verse 2
I'm from the state where folks is playing lottery
they're praying for champagne dreams,
and folks that I know get done up like Rodney King,
where the CIA turned Oakland youth from Panthers into crack fiends.
Now young souls paint ebonic ghetto tapestries on the sides of city buildings.
I'm from the state with Sharks, Giants, A's and 49ers
and children of Republicans and Democrats at Stanford and Berkeley
minor in political science because they know white-collar crime pays.
They get off like Enron
making loot off of stocks and bonds,
and if you rally the people too long
I'm from where you disappear like dot-coms
Black Panthers Brown Berets are ghetto icons.
Kids become convicts at 13
I'm from the homes of 3 strikes
25 to life for stealing a slice of pizza
where the cops are killers,
I'm from the state where the cops killed Tyisha Miller.
We call it Cali-for-nia
and young folks that we know come up MIA every day.
We got problems like LAPD and OJ
From San Jose, OAK, back to LA
All throughout the Bay, folks like and die for the Westside
We measure bloodshed in inches.
In these venomous cement districts, we live in
and citizens bear witness until it's finished.