How many times have you swallowed your tongue trying to fit in America:

Hip Hop by: Francisco Velazquez

There's a method to our madness.

How we make music from our roots,

We were taught to dance to keep our ancestors alive,

Hip hop has kept us alive.

There are revolutions in our bodies

waiting to happen,

How we've made hip hop our leader,

There is more struggle in our music

than our mouths;

We've learned to speak with the sounds of our cities,

We've learned to cry on the symphony of our streets,

Hip hop is this moment.

Hip hop is the space we fill when racism overpowers our suffrage.

Hip hop is more than the media makes us,

We make our music from the marches we are still in,

From the dead bodies we still claim.

How many lynchings does it take to unscrew a nation,

How many bullets does it take for justice to be served,

Mike Brown looks like us,

Like brown bodies aren't meant to see light,

God made us brown to attract the sun we are.

We are still fighting a war

that was passed on 15th Amendment,

We have been instructed to take the blood and body of Congress

and cross our tongue,

That we are too foreign

for any branch that has made our judicial body

a Sunday news story,

We are too full of roots

for any branch to make our limbs

their legislative decision,

We are too full of culture

to be lost in the executive home

of a broken country,

Hip-Hop is our freedom song.

As long as we have hip-hop we are free to speak on issues that jury would otherwise rule us guilty,

If you listen to us closely,

you can hear our breathing beneath the bass, 

It's why we're still alive.