"The lord lives among us
The young uns hunger become a means to get it
By any ways necessary, under pressure
Children feeling lesser, with the steel up on the dresser
Killin' will aggressors, destiny’s children
Survivors, soldiers, in front of buildings they eyes look
older
Hard to see blessings in the violent culture
Face against weapons, sirens, holsters
That ain't the way that Langston Hughes wrote us
Soul controllers on the shoulders of Moses and Noah
We go from being Precious to Oprah
Cultivated to overcome ever since we came overseas
Today and the way that you can see we determined
Solar keeps burning, shawty’s know to keep learning
Lesson’s in our life, but life stripes that we earning
Took gramps' advice that Christ is returning
Like a thief in the night, I write the beacons of light
For those of us in dark alleys and parched valleys
Street kids spark rallies of the conscience conquerors of a
contest
That seems beyond us, even through the unseen
I know that God watches
From one King's dream, he was able to Barack us
The prophets, nothing can stop us
Believe!"
For this assignment I used the
lyrics from the second verse of Common’s song The Believer. The song is about
who young African Americans in the ghetto. In my opinion his purpose in writing
this song is to give hope to young black kids, by telling them that even though
they might not be in a favorable position right now that they can make it out.
Even though I didn’t grow up in this kind situation this song still moves me
because I know people who did. The reason that the words from this song has so
much power because that’s the kind of life he came from, and I feel like
writing is always more powerful when the writer has been through what he’s
writing about. It starts off by saying that the young kid’s hunger and want
causes them to try to get what they want by any means necessary. He later
states that it’s hard for them to see blessings in the culture that they are
raised in. Another thing that he mentions is that we can go from nothing to
something and that we have been cultivated to overcome since we were brought
overseas. My favorite quote from the entire song is when he says “I know that
God watches, From one King’s dream he was able to Barack us”, Which means that
one of us was able to become the leader of the country, all from one man’s
dream.
I feel that the order of his words
in this entire verse was purposeful, and goes with the theme of the verse. What
I mean by this is he starts of by saying the negative things that poverty leads
the youth of our community to do and ends with a line about the first Black
President. This goes along perfectly with the metaphor “We go from being
Precious to Oprah” which means you can start at nothing and end up one the most
influential people in the entire world. He also uses some rhetorical techniques
in this verse. He uses a euphemism when he says “the young uns hunger a means
to get it by any means necessary” which really means that the kids rob and take
the things they want. The way he says “from on King’s dream” is a some kind of
rhetorical technique, because it sounds like he just saying that from a king’s
dream but he specifically means from Martin Luther King jr.’s dream. This is a very deep song and I would
love to analyze it line by line but I could only point out the things that I
felt was the most important.
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