Cali Dreaming

(Album: The Aloe Blacc EP 2: Me And My Music - 2004)

Wanna live my dreams
This is the last chance to make it, I gotta do something
With my life today
'Cause I been doing this music thing for so long it seems that
Something's gotta give
If I'ma stay on this long road to success
With the music I play
So I just gotta be strong and keep moving on with it

I'm not just a dreamer, I'm an intellectual coal mine
With refined rhymes like diamonds that shine
On the daily I grind, grit my teeth and push mountains full of words
With a pen to make you see clearly my troubles
All of my trifles the pressures that try to stifle
If life was holding a rifle to my head, my last thoughts would be
Simply to let my music reach to every country
Where scholars will translate it on scrolls and archive it
Where students in the classrooms of history relive it
Relive it, Because I write the words and I give it away
After it leaves my hand to the ink on the papyrus
And after I been on the stage and let the lyric fathom bust
It all belongs to y'all, that's all end of story on it
Dropping like a bomb on the planet it's the verbal atomic
Aloe Blacc remember me as enemy or friend
However you want, it doesn't really matter in the end

They say it's gonna stop
Got people telling me I'm wasting my time and that
Hip Hop's going away
I don't believe it though all my life I seen it grow so I
Don't believe a word
That I be hearing from all the haters and perpetrators
So everything they say
Is just a bucket lies to get me out the way

This is my life's work, my contribution as a public speaker
With knowledge to share and thoughts to digest
One of the freshest in the land of the west
While most niggaz measure success with the ice on they chest
I measure it with message and who spit it the best
Follow the quest like I'm the last man searching for a companion
Because when I'm dead and gone my books will still be standing
From my arial approach landing, seeing it all
Still waiting for the so-called stars to fall
Out of the polluted skies full of California dreams
People running at full speed and running out of the steam
A sparkling gleam in the eye of hopeful brothas wanting to eat
More than just the regular lunch meat, we trying to feast
On the fruits of the earth and give generous
But really men are just animals and like cannibals we been in lust
To see another man hit the dust (dust, dust)

Can't nobody tell me what to do,
'cause I am gonna do what I want to do
This is just my way of life and
I am gonna live it for me not you