The Roots - Little Ghetto Boy (Prelude) lyrics

[Malik Yusef] You know you ghetto boy, when you got a face, with a scar And yo' highest aspirations is a place, and a car Shorties pull out and bussssst, like a money shot Now he on the run, he hot And he hurtin his Granny and she the only one he got The hood so shady You give up hope, of ever even tryin to find a sunny, spot- -light, they caught him at the stop- -light, but if he woulda run that yellow Then he coulda, run the globe But insteed, with speed They put one in the middle of his frontal, lobe like a unicorn I'm just tryin to keep you, informed To my little ghetto soldiers in they, gold green, red, and blue uni-forms - chuuch! But I'm feeling like the loneliest monk So I pull me a Thelonius Monk and blew, the horn And we don the monikers of goons and gangsters And are trained to conduct ourselves true, to form So we add a Shorty, a Money, a Mack A Lil', a Eazy, or a Young to our name So all the big ballers grab rims and hung, in the game And there's a degree, of difficul-ty to make it from the ghetto boy into the man-hood Especially when you know that yo' fresh greens will help eliminated a canned, good Can, good, and bad co-exisssst? In a place with plenty of off ramps but no ex-its