| Sometimes we feel alone
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| But alone ain’t always wrong
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| Alone in a crowded room
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| My mind made up like a powder room
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| I’m the sun, giving the clouds some room
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| I shine, shine like the hour noon
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| Tune is to stay in, step with every day men
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| And women, the rythym of the realness
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| Still I’m Legend like Will Smith
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| In the presence of the fake I am a real gift
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| Open it, hopin' it’d be something dope in it
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| Movement of the people getting motion sick
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| We ride on the highs and the lows of it
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| On the Southside, we got hosed for it
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| Standing up like Rich Pryor
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| We get fire and inspire 'bout a prospect to get higher
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| Your sire on the throne grew up around the stones
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| The ranger, so I stand alone
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| I’m flying high up in the sky
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| I will not run, I will not hide
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| The only test is to survive
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| I will succeed I will not die
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| Success it is, we blessed to live
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| Not just my kids, want the best for his
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| Progression lives where the lessons is
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| I got my own, God bless the kid
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| In the mid part of Babylon listening to Farrakhan
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| In the parks of Avalon Streets we would battle on
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| Got the good book in my carry-on
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| Life is a race, I’m the marathon
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| Man on the moon, give the boy some room
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| Rose from the concrete, told you I would bloom
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| Situation brought out the hero
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| A little black 13-year-old
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| The voice of the Lord in my earlobe
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| Telling me my purpose, I could see it clearer
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| Revolution in the execution of lyrics
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| Spirit of Gil Scott, Marvin Gaye, modern day I pray
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| I’m flying high up in the sky
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| I will not run, I will not hide
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| The only test is to survive
|
| I will succeed I will not die
|
| I stand alone, I stand alone
|
| I stand alone, I stand alone
|
| I’m flying high up in the sky
|
| I will not run, I will not hide
|
| I stand alone, I stand alone
|
| I stand alone, I stand alone
|
| The only test is to survive
|
| I will succeed I will not die
|
| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| I stand alone, I stand alone
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| Alone, alone, alone
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| Alone, alone, alone
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| The irresistible appeal of Black individuality — where has all of that gone?
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| The very people who blazed our path to self-expression and pioneered a
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| resolutely distinct and individual voice have too often succumbed to
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| mind-numbing sameness and been seduced by simply repeating what we hear,
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| what somebody else said or thought and not digging deep to learn what we think
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| or what we feel, or what we believe
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| Now it is true that the genius of African culture is surely its repetition,
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| but the key to such repetition was that new elements were added each go-round.
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| Every round goes higher and higher. |
| Something fresh popped off the page or
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| jumped from a rhythm that had been recycled through the imagination of a writer
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| or a musician. |
| Each new installation bore the imprint of our unquenchable
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| thirst to say something of our own, in our own way, in our own voice as best we
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| could. |
| The trends of the times be damned
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| Thank God we’ve still got musicians and thinkers whose obsession with
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| excellence and whose hunger for greatness remind us that we should all be
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| unsatisfied with mimicking the popular, rather than mining the fertile veins of
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| creativity that God placed deep inside each of us |