[Verse 1] Sixteen bars in a bedroom with a whole life on the line, that's the gospel I was raised on and I proved it in my time. Back then a verse had to survive a room of folded arms, had to earn its every nod and pay in full for the applause. There was a man at the record shop deciding what you heard, and he was wrong about a lot, but he stood behind his word. We saved a month for an album and we sat with it for weeks, couldn't skip the parts we hated, so we learned what we would keep. Now the shop's a phone shop and the man's a name I lost, and I got everything I wanted and I never priced the cost. I'm not bitter, I'm just carrying a weight that ain't what it looks: I won the argument I started and I miss the one I took. [Pre-chorus] So pour one out for the version that I knew, it don't come back, but look at what it grew. [Chorus] Hip hop is dead, long live hip hop, they buried the sound and the sound wouldn't stop. Say it at the grave, say it in the hall, oh, the thing that saved my life was never mine at all. [Verse 2] There's a kid out of line with a laptop and a fractured screen, cut a beat up on the bus better than my whole eighteen. He don't know my catalogue, don't owe my era a listen, never waited for a co-sign, never came and asked permission. And I caught myself on Tuesday saying music's lost its aim, heard my father's exact voice come arriving in my frame, 'cause the gate they kept me out of, I'm the one who's standing in it, turning a key that I was handed like I'm the one who went and built it. The form that I'm in mourning for's the form that kept me queued, and that kid walked round the line that took me ten long years to move. So here's the joke I'm standing in that everybody missed: I prayed for it to open up. It opened. That's the risk. [Pre-chorus] So pour one out for the version that I knew, it don't come back, but look at what it grew. [Chorus] Hip hop is dead, long live hip hop, they buried the sound and the sound wouldn't stop. Say it at the grave, say it in the hall, oh, the thing that saved my life was never mine at all. [Bridge] Saved me, shaped me, sold me, shipped me, set me on a shelf, made me, made me over, made a market of myself, and I stayed 'cause the staying paid, and the paying was the trade, built a throne out of the pavement then I sat in it afraid. Borrowed brilliance, bottled lightning, bought the building with the bars, every bar a bridge I burned to get across to where you are. And the room that I was locked out of, I lock it in my turn, same hand on the same handle, same lesson, same concern. Now the kid with the cracked laptop is the kick I once received, and you can't inherit heaven while you're guarding what you leave. It saved my life, it didn't ever save it for my sake, gave me a room, then it packed it up and left me with the space. [Chorus] Hip hop is dead, long live hip hop, they buried the sound and the sound wouldn't stop. Say it at the grave, say it in the hall, oh, the thing that saved my life was never mine at all. [Outro] Long live it. Even the part I can't stand. Especially that.