Hook
Welcome 2 LA
Welcome 2 LA LA LA
Welcome 2 LA
LAAAAAA
x2

[Def Verse 1]:
Aye
To live and thrive in LA
We 5 ppl a day
We 5 minutes away
We doing it big in 5 different miniature ways
We missing you Nip
This marathon isn’t a race
Aye
Touching base with the homies,
I’m doing it for the doers I’m doing it for the dreamers
The gentrified and immigrant ancestors and dulas
The word workers and healers
I see us all in the mirror
Before rodeo was Obama
My Mornings Became Eclectic
Spitting it like a Llama
A legend right off of Western
From South Central 2 The World
South Central 2 The whole wide world
South Central 2 The World
From South Central 2 The World
x2
South Central 2 the....


[HOOK]


[Def Verse 2]:
Aye I be really from here
If you stayed in Hollywood then you ain’t really come here
Bruh you can’t say you love here
Uh Unless you know somebody From here
It’s in Everything that I’ve done
The everything that I am
And every song that I’ve sung

And Everything I’ve become
On everything that I love
On everything

[John Murillo III Poem]
If you hear the portamento whine spill and slide behind bombastic rhymes, you’re here,
where we bounce and walk to booming riot drums, marching police boots, and thumb-
thumping p-funk bass-lines. It’s our groove in good and bad times, the line on the
corona of our singular sunshine, the sol of our souls and the soles of our shoes tracing
and erasing sets atop the palm frond shadows on busted concrete or, you know, just
walking our walk. Not for lack of trying, the sunshine baked into our Black skin can’t be
gentrified away; and, no, and not for lack of trying, the dootdootdootdoots, batons, and
military grade boots can’t jettison the suns from we, angelic daughters and sons and
otherwise-identified denizens of hot and hallowed streets.
This is the golden spacetime we built and build and will build with hands differently
stained by sunlight, and we are stained glass windows, amalgamated conduits
refracting the timeless blessing of the sol soul star smiling through us. If you look, really
look, squint your eyes and screw your face and look, feel the singular heat on your flesh
and breeze ‘cross your chest and distant ocean in your nostrils and look, you might see
the vexy angels we are, the deep and untimely beings we be, and the light of the
impossible stories we bleed, and sweat, and cultivate, cook, conjure, and write, and die,
and live: all that we are is where and when you’ve arrived.
So when you step into the sunshine, stop, feel, breathe, look, and listen, before you
slide and glide into the kingdom. Feel the heat. Hear the rhymes. See life, see our lives.
What more can I say? Welcome to LA.


-Dr. John Murillo III