PRINTS DON'T MATCH THE LEGEND

[Intro] [syncopated electric bass, crisp drum kit, clean electric guitar stabs] Check the clock. (Mmm) Check the clock, don't touch it. [Verse 1] [rhythmic male vocals] You talk trenches like you taught them, wore the mud for the real 20 minutes in the dirt and scrub the blood from your heel Whole war in the caption, arsenal packed in the gramma But the hands behind the image never handle what they hammer Strap leased, plug managed, hope can't manufacture Ghost hands draft threats, your mouth performs the chapter You're not danger, you're packaging Black print, bright branding, borrowed blood passed down with the fingerprints sanded Checklist at a gunfight, check this Name, image, chain, cadence, stage scars in the edits Aerial shave, smooth every borrowed piece presented as authentic Provenance conveniently edited till I follow who gets paid And watch a menace change possession, I don't weigh blades I trace blades, forge marks, source names, who sharpened it? Who supplied it? Who signed off when you tried it? Who profits when the violence gets repackaged and recycled? You swear the block pressed your name into concrete Concrete forgot you, your publicist knows exactly which corner photographs you street You run streets? You orbit 'em Crop exits for the content, turn survival into style And sell the danger with the garment (Pop-pop-pop-pop) Pay protection, stage aggression, borrowed reputation Tourist talking occupation like proximity was participation One day, one name, one witness contradicts it One detail splits the image where the fiction got stitched And one fact cracks the facade, then the fragments become exhibits So the gangster turns to paperwork the second that it's legible Whole gangster disappears when the paperwork gets readable Bloodline, dry ink, war story, press copy Scars framed chest high, sponsored carefully cropped outside the body Every sovereign in your verse is borrowed urgency on cue You rap like death knows your address, death couldn't pick you from your crew Don't blink, don't pivot, don't look back for applause That silence isn't terror, it's the room identifying fraud You thought volume made you lethal, thought aggression made you real But steel doesn't write a history just because you flash the steel Gun don't make the hand, threat don't make the man Blood don't make a witness just because it stains the stand Corpse inside a metaphor can't testify you lived the scene Death inside a sentence doesn't certify what you have seen That's why every violent image you manufacture starts defecting Bullet has an owner, prints don't match the legend Same blood, wrong body, same smoke, wrong lungs Same scar, wrong story, same threat, higher tongue Same pose, same pro, same borrowed intimidation Same violence reprocessed, do another imitation You're a stain on somebody else's page, calling yourself scripture A muzzle flash reflected then enlarged into a picture Second-hand danger, hand-me-down anger, stage desperation You inherited the imagery, the market did the imitation Keep the strap, keep the smoke, keep the body count recital Keep rehearsing borrowed danger till the copy sounds original But copies leave artifacts, pressure leaves impressions Every myth you manufacture leaves another man's reflection I follow where it bled, red mark, red thread Every trail ran backward to another hand instead [Outro] [bass and drums continue] Check the clock, don't touch it. Time already made the cut. You build a legend out of copies and mistook the copy for the source You weren't killed, you weren't robbed, nobody came for your possession I just checked the chain of custody on your self-description Now the chain looks rented, now the scars look staged Now the blood reads like red ink, somebody else put on the page Now the threat sounds second-hand, now the voice sounds overdubbed Now the legend looks like evidence for somebody else's blood When the costume finally drops, there's no monster underneath Just somebody else's violence fitting loosely to your speech No mythology remaining, no intimidation left Just the counterfeit confession with another person's prints Prints don't match the legend. Case closed. Keep the receipt. (Mmm) [fade out]