Released on March 22, 1994

Thumbnail

[Verse 1]

Now I'm a flip the track and bring you back to reality

I'm like Wesley Snipes, I act without a salary

Cause I don't need nobody saying "Lights, Camera, Action!"

I act on reaction

Fuck what you see on television

Cause nowadays all of us live in the hellavision

On every single channel it's the same old same

Brothers' poppin their brain

Or gettin wrecked at a soccer game

Six brothers fallin victim to the street

Aftermath of the drive-by rolling in the black jeep

Every other channel spent its money on the talk shows

From Oprah to Geraldo, everybody in New York knows

But when a brother gets real

They make the story opposite

And try to offer niggas raw deals


[Hook]

Television tells lies to the vision

The world's a prison

We're livin in hellavision


[Verse 2]

Every day your life to me is drama

But not the type of drama that my T.V. shows

Because it makes the drama calmer

When a lady's caught cheatin

She steps with the next man

And doesn't even catch a ass-beatin

Reality check - that's what the T.V. said

Cause in real life it's two to the fuckin head

Yosemite Sam filling Bugs with slugs

Wile E. Coyote always cooking up these deadly drugs

Bart Simpson is cursing up a storm

And children love this shit man, come on

I see kids that say bringing guns to school

Ten year old crack heads and that ain't cool

My four year old daughter curses worse than Bart

Straight from my heart, it's tearing me apart


[Hook]


[Verse 3]

And now, hip hop is labelled as a violencer

Like everyone who rhymes packs a Tec with the silencer

Every other month a hip hopper goes to prison

Over some dumb shit or for the real life living

But who's to know what we've been going through

When all you see is one side of us

The side the T.V. be showing you

You never hear about the stress or the work

Or the hard times we had or hip hop was getting jerked

You only see us in the limelight

But when the night comes, we're always linked to crime, right?

Man - what I've been through is strife

Yo - they could make fifty movies of my motherfucking life

And there's a million like me

The people you don't see

When you watch your everyday T.V


[Hook]