Cinemetropolis

This is the scene you been seeing all your life
 The one inside a dream you repeated every night
 For 24 frames every second through the light
 Projected through the screen you been paying for despite
 What you see and what you hear, contrary to your sight
 Everything you ever learned that you never had to live
 Might've heard from a story teller medium
 Pictures, words, scriptures to cinema script
 Writing a verse
 From this city emerges a new generation of babies
 Who came out of the womb, glued to the tube
 With plans and aspirations to prove beyond doubt
 We are stars too, even if it's just cartoons
 My animated hands that I got from the
 Genes of my island native fam I could never not be
 I'm here to make them scream like a Hitchcock dame
 Whether analog, dig it all, shit is all the same
 An American tradition, a narrative for fiction
 A Hamilton for tickets, the public is addicted
 Just think for a second how much we've been conditioned
 To root for the Doughboys, the O-Dogs, the Bishops
 Sided with them villains, in spite of what they heeded
 He said she gotta have it, she said she didn't need it
 And even if she see it, she will probably not believe it
 If it ain't bein' projected in a wide screen theatre
 If it spins on a reel, it's gotta be real
 But 'real' in real life just remind us of film
 And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
 Like a film's much realer than anything you feel
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis...
 They try to say we bad kids from the start
 Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola, yet quoting Godard
 And you saying that everything is cinema since
 The moving pictures in the center of your living room telling you shit
 Like you'll never be shit, walk away from all your dreams
 Spark up, drop a lighter on a trail of gasoline
 Leading back to the vehicle you crashed before you came
 Never looking back, cut, boom, end of scene
 We've been gunning for that hundred and some change
 The flicks and the flickering flames that been going the same length
 Doing battle with the powers that be
 That'll be no longer in position when the power's getting seized
 So cameras we got redirected from the poor
 I directed for my people, *Lino Brocka with the horn*
 When the brother yelled 'action' it wasn't just for his act
 'Cause he wanted to see the masses get they asses out the door (get up)
 My marvelous marksmanship is sharp, shit is hard
 But we make it look not, we auteurs
 The Godfather poster on the wall, 14
 With a movie in my head, writing's the next thing
 So we shot y'all 35 millimeter rockstars
 How about some hardcore senior to your sophomores
 Flyer than a Concorde landing on your concourse
 Rolling with the vanguard, burning down your arthouse
 If it's spinning on a reel, it's gotta be real
 But 'real' in real life just remind you of film
 And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
 Blade running like a samurai, killing himself
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis (in a Cinemetropolis)
 In a Cinemetropolis...*
 Click.