Return to the Marvelous World (Lyrics)
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Pink Floyd again and it’s caused me to go back through some of my old songs and albums.
A lot of the Hip Hop artists from my generation were influenced by people like Jay-Z, Nas and Eminem. While I was definitely a fan of all three MC’s, among many others, I was never really influenced by them artistically. Sure, I was in awe of their abilities from a songwriting and technical perspective, but in my mind they were a distant second to Roger Waters- who was, and is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist who ever lived. That’s who I was chasing. I wanted to create something as timeless as Dark Side of the Moon or as brilliant as The Wall. I wanted to write a song like In The Flesh or Brain Damage. I wanted to poke my fingertips into the bubble of greatness that surrounded Waters and Pink Floyd as a whole. My entire life as a songwriter was a race to catch up with something that came thirty years before me but was lightyears beyond.
In 2010 I began recording songs for my second album with Rodney Hazard titled, Pyramids in Stereo. It was an unnerving time for me since the studio I usually recorded in had been torn down and the engineer I had formed a deep bond with on the first album relocated to Montreal. I was in a new studio with an unfamiliar engineer, which dialed up my pre-existing insecurities to one hundred. I was as uncomfortable during those sessions as I had ever been.
The first song I recorded was the introduction to the album titled, Return to the Marvelous World.
For years I struggled with my voice because it had a tendency to drift into the same octave as Eminem and I wrote songs in a similar multisyllabic rhyme format. It would be easy to mistake me for a bad Marshall Mathers knockoff, and I was well aware of my close proximity to him, so I was always trying to force my voice into a different key or octave to avoid that space altogether. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
But as I stood in that foreign recording booth with a strange pair of eyes staring back at me, I decided to just go for it and be myself. No more forcing my voice into a non-Marshall pitch. I’m just going to weave myself into the music and whatever comes out is what it will be.
This was the song where I finally found my voice. It also happens to be one of my favorite pieces of writing I ever produced:
Beautiful blue planet floating underneath the moon
Dying from pollution and products that we consume
The start of something special, like Jesus in the womb
All attention to the elephant asleep in the room
As soon as I awake I could redesign your fate
Swimming up shit creek, I pull you out of dire straits
Introduce you to the Africans
Babies with their legs blown off cause they couldn’t find a way to shackle them
So the multinationals involved in diamond trafficking
Bring it to the States then they sell it to the rappers and
You’re looking so fresh when you’re flashing your
Chain- never seen a slave ship because brother you’re a passenger
Imagine if you were the catalyst
For all that pain and suffering, I know it’s hard to fathom it
You wanted flow and so we opened up the aqueducts
Hold them under water, if they’re moving they ain’t had enough
Take them out to Panama
Let them see the cocaine trade at it’s basics, ki’s wrapped and loaded on a plane its
Final destination
Every housing project, ghetto and reservation, entire races
Eliminated systematically
Televised propaganda a major part of their strategy
Tune into channel three, news of a tragedy
Brought to you by Anderson, Bill, Blitzer and Hannity
Your reality delivered by the media
Reinforced by the political theater
You better vote or die
But right or left the ninety eight percent at the bottom are getting pulverized
Close your eyes
If you’re waiting for a slaughter this conveyor belt is making you a martyr
We saw it with Katrina, no response from FEMA
But still the sheep are so content with following the leader
I call them like I see them and your vision was blurred
Their official stories never really occurred
Governments under control of the banks
Their economies imploded and tanked
Pedophiles hidden within a diocese
Members of homicidal secret societies
I drag them to their burial
Over top I built my pyramids in stereo