This is the scene you been seeing all your life
The one inside a dream you repeated every night
For 24 frames every second through the light
Projected through the screen you been paying for despite
What you see and what you hear, contrary to your sight
Everything you ever learned that you never had to live
Might've heard from a story teller medium
Pictures, words, scriptures to cinema script
Writing a verse
From this city emerges a new generation of babies
Who came out of the womb, glued to the tube
With plans and aspirations to prove beyond doubt
We are stars too, even if it's just cartoons
My animated hands that I got from the
Genes of my island native fam I could never not be
I'm here to make them scream like a hitchcock dame
Whether analog, dig it all, shit is all the same
An american tradition, a narrative for fiction
A hamilton for tickets, the public is addicted
Just think for a second how much we've been conditioned
To root for the doughboys, the o-dogs, the bishops
Sided with them villains, in spite of all they heeded
He said she gotta have it, she said she didn't need it
And even if she see it, she will probably not believe it
If it ain't bein' projected in a wide screen theatre
If it spins on a reel, it's gotta be real
But 'real' in real life just remind us of film
And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
Like a film's much realer than anything you feel

In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)
In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)
In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)

In a cinemetropolis...

They try to say we bad kids from the start
Grandchildren of marx and coca-cola, yet quoting godard
And you saying that everything is cinema since
The moving pictures in the center of your living room telling you shit

Like you'll never be shit, walk away from all your dreams
Spark up, drop a lighter on a trail of gasoline
Leading back to the vehicle you crashed before you came
Never looking back, cut, boom, end of scene
We've been gunning for that hundred and some change
The flicks and the flickering flames that been going the same length
Doing battle with the powers that be
That'll be no longer in position when the power's getting seized
So cameras we got redirected from the poor
I directed for my people, lino brocka with the horn
When the brother yelled 'action' it wasn't just for his act
'cause he wanted to see the masses get they asses out the door (get up)
My marvelous marksmanship is sharp, shit is hard
But we make it look not, we auteurs
The godfather poster on the wall, 14
With a movie in my head, writing's the next thing
So we shot y'all 35 millimeter rockstars
How about some hardcore senior to your sophomores
Flyer than a concorde landing on your concourse
Rolling with the vanguard, burning down your arthouse

If it's spinning on a reel, it's gotta be real
But 'real' in real life just remind you of film
And now you saying something's like a movie when it's real
Blade running like a samurai, killing himself
In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)
In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)
In a cinemetropolis (in a cinemetropolis)
In a cinemetropolis...
Click.