[Intro]
Yeah — vinyl hiss, Walkman whisper, subway screech through the night
Chasing stars where the streetlights hum — come on
[Verse 1]
On stoop steps, sun sets, young vets with verb sets,
Boombox knocks, block talks, cassette decks with breath chests.
Nike Cortez scuff, corner-store Slurpee drip, cherry stain on a tongue-tied script,
Spray-can hiss, tag flash, payphone click — last call on the list.
Kids trade bars like baseball cards, stanzas sticky, sticky with hope,
Freestyles peel paint off the stoop, tight-lipped prophets learn to cope.
Internal lines, triple-time, spit rhythm like rusted chain links,
Smokestack skyline, sky-lines rhyme, city hums, and the heart thinks.
Walkman pop, tape reel flips, hiss of a chorus, crackle like old sins,
Subway screech, steel wheels preach, every stop a new chapter begins.
[Chorus — Call & Response]
Lead: We rise, we grind — (we rise!)
Response: Keep the soul in the rhyme — (keep the soul!) [scratch]
Lead: We rise, we grind — (we grind!)
Response: Keep the soul in the rhyme — (keep the soul!) [percussion stab]
(repeat twice)
[Verse 2]
Corner cypher forms, two pairs of laces untied, one dreams loud enough to be heard,
Little Marco with a burnt tape, lost verse in a pocket — found later in a bird.
He hums to the hum of the block, dreams outsized like boom-bap bass,
Hunchbacked under streetlight halos, chalk maps of routes to escape.
Grocery light flickers, the clerk hums a hymn to the register, coins clink,
Neighbors count on breaths between bars, inhale, exhale, think.
Multisyllable missiles, internal chisel, I sculpt the scene — temple of mean,
Bars stitch the seams of seamstress streets, patchwork hope, concrete clean.
We trade names for nicknames, truths for broken truths, rhythm for proof,
Cassette spit, headphone split, rewind the clip — loop the roof of the booth.
[Chorus — Call & Response (variation)]
Lead: We rise, we grind — (we rise, we grind)
Response: Keep the soul in the rhyme — (keep the soul in the rhyme) [double-time ad-lib]
Lead: We rise — (rise!) We grind — (grind!)
Response: Keep the soul in the rhyme — (keep the soul) [scratches slice the line]
[Instrumental Break]
[2-bar instrumental — jazzy piano chop, horn stab, vinyl crackle]
[scratch lead fills 2 bars — leave space for a shout: "yo!"]
[Bridge]
Turntables spin sermon, needles preach to the groove,
Bassline like a heartbeat tapping code for the move.
Leave two beats, breathe — let the alley breathe with you,
Add a little reverb on the hook, watch the night blue.
[Verse 3 — Vignette]
Trey was twelve, jersey sleeves too long, pockets full of rhymes not dimes,
He wrote a reroute to the future on the back of battered mime-lined signs.
Mixtape missing, thrown in a gutter by a jealous grin — silent theft,
He learned to hustle silence into sound, turned that setback into deft.
One cypher night, under flicker-flash of a busted stoop lamp,
He spit the missing verse like a medicine, crowd clapped back — stamp.
Old heads nodded, a DJ looped the lost verse back
