Classic Verse: Talib Kweli’s “Move Somethin’” (Lyrics & Video)

If I said I was putting a verse of Reflection Eternal's seminal "Train of Thought" I bet most heads would assume I was going to launch into Kweli's work on "The Blast", but while "Blast" is far more well known, it's actually Kweli's work on the banging "Move Somethin'" that always got me the most fired up. More than a decade later and this ish still goes hard.

Lyrics are underneath the video:

"To be continued...
Lets see what's next up on the menu run up in you
Lyrics that be fuckin with you
In the mental
Pick any mental
Instra, funda, dentra
Extra Extra large like the borough of brooklyn the residential
?extra-stencial? this specialist
Like sly stone wit my poem and fly song
Ride along capture live and die strong word
We gonna rock till nothing else matters
You catch bodies, we catch exelent cadavers
Your next of kin an' shatter stories splattered in the tabloids
Erase your trace like your cotton mouth and we pepperment altoids
Step in the high reppin the spot called Flatbush
Whether rappers or actors you still feel the gat bust
The abstract then becomes the reality
Alcoholics like to call it the moment of clearity"

Kweli might be the most poly-syllabic emcee in hip-hop history - I guarantee if you were to conduct a study you'd find his words per line average was crazy high - and while that tendency to cram as much into every line sometimes makes his flows too choppy, here it works perfectly. He knows just when to restrain himself while still packing in some seriously dense lines; case in point the "peppermint altoids" line. Still, while I could spend hours breaking down every nuance of his delivery, for me this verse is truly classic because it passes the late night driving test. When I'm driving late at night and need a track I can rap along to so I can stay awake, "Move Somethin'" is always in my top ten, and you can't deny energy like that, you've got to move somethin.