Redefined

INTRO: This is the tale of two cities / just think of me as your tour guide ladies and gentlemen / follow me...

VERSE 1: Welcome to the city, welcome to the gritty concrete where cons and creeps sweep / sweet pretty young girls off their feet, off the Ave, off the beaten path / cops walk the beat and clash with the bad bloods / the average thug is not a savage but likes to behave like Hades spat him up / (this is) home of the white tee's over the wife beaters down to the white sneaks / this must be a man's world cause all these girls dress like the dancers in the club / I drove up 106 then parked till it got dark and watched as the L's got sparked / the shells shot sharp and whizzed by and all I could think to myself is that hell's not far / a car stopped, the window came down, she lied about her age, hopped in, went down the wrong road / a song showed her how to get it, radio played it, no edit, video aided and abetted / a mom calls on Christ's name as her youngest son takes his slain brother's place at the dice game / nice aim, they taught you to aim for nothing and look, you hit it, dead on the button / then we say it's all good, just cause it's all hood, if only we all could, live like we should //

HOOK: First we grab the text, next we read His mind / then we hit the set, the set gets redesigned / redefine city, redefine hood / redefine all, redefine good / redefine him, redefine her / we need to try and swim, up against the current / redefine live, redefine church / read the fine print, from the divine word //

VERSE 2: My double-XL tells triple-X tales, sells triple-X video cassettes through the mail / since sex sells I guess the next logical step was for them to turn around and sell sex / I wrote em, they ain't never wrote me back, maybe it's time to go our separate ways like Kobe and Shaq / hold up, rewind that, redefine that, imagine the media feeding us divine facts / what if our magazines felt like they just had to screen what they gave us and cared about how our kids are raised up? / picture the radio letting a brother save a soul and not playing a jam unless it's showing us the way to go / that's what the city could use and needs to see, new you's and me's trooping these city streets / and just in case you can't recollect how this could be done let me run it down step by step //

VERSE 3: You're dealing with a pity feeling ex-villain, feeling pity for my city Philly that I'm still in / Lord willing soon we'll start building up and filling in the gaps between spiritual generations from our past and our children / (we need) real women on duty, yeah she's a cutie but her outer frame's eclipsed by inner beauty / imagine that (what's that) a beauty pageant that, is not based on, a pretty face or thong / and where my fellas at? all my zealous cats, who shed a tear over the fact that hell is packed / cats that's jealous at, the way the Lord is treated, who see the Lord getting cheated on and they get heated / that's Elijah for you, that's the Bible for you, we gone take the streets, that's revival for you / reverse that, run that verse back, picture the city of Brotherly Love with no thugs / what if the Big Apple wasn't a rotten one, and cats were following the only begotten Son? / what if the Fifth Ward had the light of Christ shinning inside of it and wasn't dark as a.. / and New Jeruz was switched up, and started looking more like the New Jeruz of Scripture? / well till that new heaven and earth comes down let's show em how we represent heaven on earth now //