[prod. by mr. master]

[intro: grip grand, mr. master]

Look! Up in the sky!

It's a bird! It's a plane!

No, it's- What?

(Winnin' competitions with super raps)

Doubt

Man, this is the stupidest song I've ever heard

Straight SOS

Need to cut that shit off, it's too dumb

Tell me about it

Too dumb

Retarded, Straight retarded

[verse: mr. master]

From charging AP kids a stack to get my homework copied

To writing some of the stupidest songs no one has ever heard

You'd think a decade's worth o' wordsmanship

Would guarantee metastructural integrity

When the meta's only structured that worse

But that's the way these things work

See, when I start getting all expressivе and symbolic

It's impossible for y’all to actualize an honest diagnostic

As if quoting Aеsop Rock’ll make it more obvious

Ultra is like a screensaver of 3D pipes

Colorful and labyrinthine

But only ever seen if you do nothing for a really long time

And why? Why bother tryna innovate in a space so trivialized

For the equivalent of a head pat and a get back in line?

For the heads, too shrewd. For the brains, too swine

For Broadway, too broadly defined

And who am I to argue otherwise?

Bedroom rapper solitarily confined

Showin’ off shooin’ away the shine

When in reality, part of me would die for the…

Not for the tributes or the titles

Just the recognition of my work as worthwhile

To have the explicit goal of being misunderstood means

Misunderstanding maxes upward mobility

Toward a downward spiral

I’d be a god damn liar if I said I wouldn’t be gassed

If I woke up one morning and ultra went viral

This meritocraticism makes for a meretricious cycle

Esoterica is a cruel mistress, and our marriage is final

Scaling that up though

Fame ever at our necks has chiseled our culture cutthroat

Of course I would love a platform to broadcast from

But platforms and broadcast are the exact source of the problem

Inherent in the medium-message dynamic

Is the conviction that the message is worth mediating

It’s that conviction that has us deteriorating

To say nothing of the telephone game of meme-making

The train was derailed before it left the station

So tell me, how the hell do I spread the message

That the problem is spreading messages?

The issue demanding the most urgent attention

Is that of disallowing urgency to demand attention

By the way, I’m a SoundCloud rapper

I’m asking this question?

And who am I asking?

My viewership skews teenage demographically

Multidimensional inconsequentiality

The circumstance would be laughable if in 2017

I chose not to direct this tragedy

When ultra first started, I made a pact

Instead of living life humbly and purely

I’d jump in a hoodie and rap

Half as a romantic act of dedication to craft

Half fully prepared for a crash

Knowing I’d be proud of the spot where I splat

I aimed for that

I asked for this flavor of feeling bad

Rather than wrestling with having not and wishing I had

If only happily taking blame negated feeling sad

What conceit it is to suffer from impostor syndrome

My gigantic trophy case has fogged up windows

Picture o' health so long, got sick o' yourself. How regretful

Not the first timberless tree fall, not the last

Ain't a damn thing special

This obsession with exceptional neglects

The inseparability of said from

Demonstration of rules as inexorable

What's the opposite of survivor's guilt?

Way too overly technical

Authenticity

Saying simply

“It feels like I wasted ten years of my life”

Isn’t me

I just talk super wordily

If you don’t understand my raps

Imagine knowing me personally

Layers of vocabulary curtain a man who asks nervously

“What is this new nerdcore thing even worth?

Like, in terms of actually improving the earth?”

Some days I wake up and ultra feels like a lie

Heavy sigh

Back to work

[outro: mr. master]

I am the best rapper you will ever hear in your life

Guess that’s just somethin’ we’ll keep

Between you and me