Artist/Band:
Macklemore
Lyrics for Song: Claiming The City
Lyrics for Album: The Language Of My World [2005]
Life moves pretty fast,
You don't stop and look around once awhile you could miss it.
Look, I've been away from my city, the city's changes aint pretty
Theys still be playing the dizzy.
Forgotten corners, the city's forgotten its warriors,
who died young, i aint taking the sun is shining before us.
I rhyme, rotten bodies spread lies in the boarders of concrete and glass
foul hearted police aiming their gas.
My head hangs low but beats my hope goes slaying the past
And days i couldn't glade to the pack.
We the same kids they'd be sending to invade Iraq,
and the per say to crack.
I got that Gray Goose and OJ in the glass.
The last day before my cousin hit the pen down the swing,
I came back to the town just to be down with the king.
And love is surrounding it seems,
Just then he find out it his baby cousin fell off a balcony.
Images of involving paradise is drowning me.
Lost souls and I can't let go until no
the same scenario that rules double bello
black, brownted yellow
southsiders tell the devil hello
and heaven by and it hurts to much to ask why.
From places of plenty to the space with no pity the
force is changing our city,
one day at a time.
If I don't change whats been given,
what can I say to my children who gonna be claiming this city,
one day at a time.
I grew up on Capitol Hill
with two parents and two cars.
They had a beautiful marriage, we even had a swing set in our yard.
My mom didn't have a job, because my dad made enough
money that we could live comfortably and he could support us.
Now, he commute to Tacoma, so we knew we be good.
But then I realized everybody looked just like me in my neighborhood.
I go to school, which was diverse.
But indeed us, I got sandwiches and carpi suns well
my friends ate their free lunch.
It's crazy trying to look back, cause when I was growing up
I didn't understand the fact was there's something called a social status.
And my black friends wanted my financial bracket.
And then my city's divided,
from neighborhood to neighborhood
We're polarized but we claim we're progressive.
The police shoot in the hood but never once in my residence.
As a white person been shot at we'd stopped in a Lexus.
And to think that we have claimed that so much has changed
since Brown verses the bored of education and Roe verses Wade.
But around my way it all stays the same,
they just figured out a way to septate the black and white ways.
From places of plenty to the space with no pity the
force is changing our city,
one day at a time.
If I don't change whats been given,
what can I say to my children who gonna be claiming this city,
one day at a time.
From places of plenty to the space with no pity the
force is changing our city,
one day at a time.
If I don't change whats been given,
what can I say to my children who gonna be claiming this city,
one day at a time.
Say its the richest city in the world,
riding, its just a pimp city in the shadows of Amazon's office site.
And the jungle down the slide in Jose Rizas park.
Its hard in the gate with a trail to a place over I-5
where families survive, most my early life we'd known about it
called development.
They kick them folks out and move them around every
chance they can since so sacred of homelessness but
ignoring them aint goin to change it
And tearing down there decks aint gonna make your ass safer.
For all that paper wasting, just to build up Safeco,
while Garfeild High School still remains like a slave.
Oh, we gave up on hope a long time ago son.
I woke on this floor after pacing hours before,
mind racing like a child torn in war zones.
With every side challenge we need to manage and understand
this balance I can't fall or falter.
Brother, I'm just the author and no amount of words
offered is ever been enough alter this system swallowing
souls broke my own folks from up coast.
Only dreams close of what America was supposed to be.
But works for rich only the south in reality.
Take my family back to what they were running from
before, when they left that war.
Same shit, different continent.
Home don't exist anymore.
Home don't exist anymore.
The 206 today is just aint the same.
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