Sylvia Robinson - Beat Street Breakdown lyrics

* organized by Rhino comp. for convenience regardless of original [ Melle Mel ] Beat Street Breakdown, rrrrhaa! Beat Street, the king of the beat You see him rockin that beat from across the street And huh-huh, Beat Street is a lesson, too Because ah, you can't let the streets beat you Uh! Well, a picture can express a thousand words To describe all the beauty of life you give And if the world was yours to do over I know you'd paint a better place to live Where the colors would swirl And the boys and girls can grow in peace and harmony And where murals stand on walls so grand As far as the eyes are able to see, ha I never knew art till I saw your face And there'll never be one to take your place Cause each and every time you touch a spraypaint can Michaelangelo's soul controls your hands Then serenades of blue and red And the beauty of the rainbow fills your head Crescendo colors playin tunes Man why oh why you'd have to die so soon? Ashes to ashes and dust to dust Where the good die young is all thy must Cause as life must live d**h must die And the tears shall fall from the living eye Huh, teardrops fall for the state of mind Of the beautiful lady that you left behind In love and alone, but now you're dead And she still can't get you out of her head, huh More tears fall for all you've done Tried to be a good father to your only son But now who's gonna make sure that he's fed Put a shirt on his back and a roof over head? Tell me who's gonna dream the impossible dream Of the beautiful cities and the islands and streams When your works of art brought into being All that the ghetto stopped you from seeing Bums on the sidewalk, garbage in the street Abandoned buildings, bricks of concrete The ladies on the corner are sellin that body And everybody wants a part in that party I'm hangin out tough rockin late at night Runnin wild in the town of the neon lights You either play some ball or stand in the hall Huh, you gotta make somethin out of nothin at all I'm sittin in the cla**room learnin the rules And it says you can't do graffiti in school That can't be wrong in the hallowed hall So my notebook turned into a big wall The heart of a lion and the courage of three And the mind of a man much wiser than me You're the soul of the brother who won't come back Who died in my arms on the railroad track Cause I'm caught in a rat race lookin for my own space It gotta be a better place for you and me There's pie in the sky and a eye for a eye Some people gotta die just to be free You search for justice and what do you find? You find just us on the unemployment line You find just us sweatin from dawn to dusk There's no justice, it's, huh, just us Still life urban masterpiece Your trademark was written on trains and walls A million dollar gift only God released Huh, and yet you got k**ed for nothin at all So after this there'll be no more hard time No more bad times and no more pain No more chump change, none of that bull Just movies, museums and the hall of fame So all you hip-hops, get on up And let's take it to the top where we belong Cause the age of the Beat Street wave is here Everybody let's sing along, now come on And say hooo (Hooo) Say hooo (Hooo) And to let me know I'm rockin the microphone Everybody say Ramon (Ramon) Ramon (Ramon) Rrrrhaa! A newspaper burns in the sand And the headlines say 'Man Destroys Man' Extra extra, read all the bad news On the war for peace that everybody would lose The rise and fall, the last great empire The sound of the whole world caught on fire The ruthless struggle, the desperate gamble The game that left the whole world in shambles The cheats, the lies, the alibies And the foolish attempts to conquer the sky Lost in space, and what is it worth? Huh, the President just forgot about Earth Spendin multi-billions and maybe even trillions The cost of weapons ran in the zillions There's gold in the street and there's diamond under feet And the children in Africa don't even eat Flies on their faces, they're livin like mice And their houses even make the ghetto look nice Huh, the water tastes funny, it's forever too sunny And they work all month and don't make no money A fight for power, a nuclear shower A people shout out in the darkest hour Sights unseen and voices unheard And finally the bomb gets the last word Christians k**ed m**ms and Germans k**ed Jews And everybody's bodies are used and abused Huh, minds are poisoned and souls are polluted Superiority complex is deep rooted Leeches and lices, and people got prices Egomaniacs control the self-righteous Nothin is sacred and nothin is pure So the revelation of d**h is our cure Dachau Auswich, Hiroshima A Vietnam Lenigrad Iwogima Okinawa, Korea, the Phillipines, Devastation d**h against the k**ing machine Peoples in terror, the leaders made a error And now they can't even look in the mirror Cause we gotta suffer while things get rougher And that's the reason why we got to get tougher So learn from the past and work for the future And don't be a slave to no computer Cause the children of Man inherit the land And the future of the world is in your hands So just throw your hands in the air And wave em like you just don't care And if you believe that you're the future Scream it out and say oh yeah (Oh yeah) Oh yeah (Oh yeah) Rrrrhaa! Beat Street Breakdown, rrrrhaa!