Dead prez - Food, Clothes & Shelter lyrics

Yeah for all my peoples that's hungry

A nigga need food: you got to
Have food for your health
And clothes: gear to keep
Esteem for yourself, son
Shelter: a place to lay for
Rest when you're stressed
Over life cause it's trife and ain't
No God gonna help ya

I feel the winter heart creeping
Vicious as the wind, which is life
When it's deep without a meaning
A trife scene it screams
Niggas fiending the pipe dream
And some be seeming
Like the only way to keep
Breathing in the slums, but nothing comes
And keeping funds is like dreaming
My situation: no solution even
The young become demons where I'm from
Shit is unyielding something
Like three hundred million
Gun-wielding black rats trapped
In one building
With low ceilings and no feelings
Cutthroat villains, dope dealings
And glossy-eyed pavilions
Sunken faces and powder traces
My people slave for the basics
The powerless devoured in the matrix
Of politics, pimps, and glass pipe
From gun blast and flicking off blunt ash
The cash heist
The fast life, where the have nots rule
Stick and grab plots, toting tools
Victim last by some jewels
'Round the world, we stay stuck in capsules
Shackled and crackas got homes like castles
I figure the only way this nigga
Got to go is wild
Plotting licks for liberation
Stocking cap style

He's just hungry for knowledge
That's all yeah
That brother's starving! So am l
Let's get something to eat

Yo, I was born in the storm
Hearing gun clap for thunder
See my childhood peers catching
Years in the numbers i wake up from hunger
Try to lift my stress that I'm under
How I made it this far makes me wonder
You in a fight for ya life
For basic human rights
Can't afford the booming prices
It's economic crisis
Life is a sacrifice i'm down to
My last bag of rice
They forcing us to live like laboratory mice
Like fucking laboratory mice that's right
You wear the camouflage
But do you choose to live the soldier's life?
I said before, "This is a war
Not a play fight" taught to be a slave from
The womb to the gravesite
Some of us even share the
Views of the Canaanites tryna be white
But they gon' lose in this game of life
So dead that i tie my dread back and scheme
Put a star on my red, black, and green

Pay the bills, put food on the table
And put clothes on your back you understand?

What do power mean? Our team
Seem to think it means sour cream
Cause our dreams got us
Fiending for the power, son
And Huey P said political power come
From the barrel of the gun
What do power mean? I believe in thieving
And smoking weed everything happen
For a reason i hope my seed grow up and
Get even it's open season
And if you poor and black
You know the reason yeah

Nah'mean? We out here fighting for the basics
(Tryna get all we can get) tryna
Get food on the table, clothes on our
Back, pay these bills dead Presidents that's
The come-up for us food, clothes
And shelter ain't no need to
Even say nothing else (Word up)

"And whatever may happen, fear not"