Fire in the Booth

"I like you, you're like a tiger"

[Verse 1: Akala]

Yes, I grew up on the dole in a single parent family

Been through a little bit of tragedy

Yes I was around drugs and violence before the day that I started secondary

And that’s part of it not half of it, get the picture, the rest ain’t necessary

Growing up, got a little caught up, but that ain’t even half of my life

Also given the knowledge of self, that is all we actually need to survive

If you saw me aged 9, reading Malcolm just fine

Teachers still treated me stupid

Students that couldn’t speak English, they put me in groups with

And the irony is some of the first man to give me schooling you would call gangsters

I already explained, we know what the truth is

They used to say, "Don’t be like me"

Yeah I got a name and dough on the street

Night time comes, I can’t sleep

And that’s the part that rappers don’t speak

We don’t hit the road 'cause we are tugs

Don’t come out the womb, wanting to sell drugs

If we got the right guidance and love

Would we fight people just like us?

How could I knock the hustle to get by?

How do you think I ate as a child?

Judge no one, done many things wrong

I just don’t boast about it songs

But listen to my older bars

I was just as confused as you probably are

But you grow and you learn, travel and fuck up

One too many man you know get cut up

One too many man that could’ve been doctors

End up spending their whole life boxed up

You learn, if you study

It's all set out just to make them money

No cover, it’s all about getting poor people to fight with one another

So its logical that us killing our brothers, dissing our mothers

Is right in line with the dominant philosophy of our time

But time is a cycle, not a line

Comes back around you regain your mind

You be ready for the energy I channel in my rhymes

Remedy the pedigree, the jeopardy of mine

When the world’s this fucked up, lethargy’s a crime

We can all fight with our brothers over crumbs

Harder to fight the one who makes guns

We can all talk shit and get two dollars

Harder to be the one who seeks knowledge

If we understood economics

We’d know money’s nothin’

Think nothing of it

Money is a means to get wealth, not the wealth itself

And don’t get confused, I’m far from broke

All that you see me do I own

But I won't hang what I make around my neck

I know from where that the diamonds came

But I do quite literally own a library

That definitely costs more than your chain

And businesses, and properties

Far from starvin’, I eat quite properly

And I don’t care, just said it for the kids

Who need to know that you’re not broke to listen

Don’t know an asset from a liability

They’ve never been shown or told the difference

So they don’t change situations

Richest man in Britain is Asian

That’s significant, not coincidence

Asian people build businesses

Not by flossin', going out shoppin’

Giving out their culture for everyone’s profit

Who run’s Bollywood? Indian people

Who runs our shit?

So we shake our arse and dance

As if racism just upped and vanished

But has it? No its right on course

You’re beaten so bad, you’re trained to ignore

Let me not just make sweeping statements

Give me a second, I’ll explain it

For small amounts of drug possession there’s more black people in jail in America than there is for rape and armed robbery and murder all put together

You can say they’re just locking up tugs

Imagine if they locked up every middle class kid that had ever held drugs

Oh that’s right, that’d be your kids!

Bigger than that, what is going on with this?

Prison in America’s a private business

They get paid fifty-k per year per inmate by the State, just wait…

Also legally are allowed to use their prison inmates as slaves

Cheap slave labour, big corporations

They come out of jail when they can’t get a job

So when we celebrate going to jail

We are literally celebrating enslavement

Add to that, that the hood that you’re livin’

Engineered social condition that breeds crime by design

Where do you think you get your nine?

You can say that they’re just black

But I like to deal with facts

In the 1920s you would’ve found in America, Black towns

Prospering centres of economics and education to make you proud

But some people couldn’t bear that the former slaves would not just lie down

So the KKK and other hate groups burnt those towns to the ground

Killin hundreds

If it ain’t understood

You think you were always livin’ in the hood?

Shit it’s only been sixty years

Since they hung blacks and burned em’

And that was so cool

They were your pastors' picnic baskets

Even gave kids the day off school

To go see a lynching; have a picnic

It’s fun to watch the little monkeys die

Then people act a little dysfunctional

You wanna pretend that you don’t know why

If your colour means you can be killed

And you’re powerless to get justice about it

Is it difficult to figure out how you would then end up feelin’ about it?

And that ain’t excuses

Just dealing with the roots of abuses that make a reality

Where a generation of young men speak of ourselves as dirt casually

That’s America, this Britain

Some things are similar, some different

In this country the first enslaved were the working class

What’s changed? Worst jobs, worst conditions

Worst taxed, look where you’re livin’

You go to the pub, Friday night

You will fight with a guy, don’t know what for

But won’t fight with a guy, suit and a tie

Who sends your kids to die in a war

They don’t send the kids of the rich or politicians

It’s your kids, the poor British

That they send to go die in a foreign land

For these wars you don’t understand

Yeah they say that you are British

And that lovely patriotism they feed ya'

But in reality, you have more in common with immigrants

Than with your leaders

I know, both side of my family

Black and white are fed ghetto mentality

Reality in this system, poor people are dirt regardless of shade

But with that said, let’s not pretend that everything is the same

When our grandparents came here to Britain

If you had a criminal record you couldn’t get in

Yet that ain’t protect them from all the stupid, stupid abuses they would be livin’

Kicked in the teeth, stabbed in the street

Many times fired bombed our houses

Put faeces through our letterbox and of course the cops did so much about it

Daily, up to the '80s people spittin’ into my pram 'cause I was a coon baby

But of course, that has had no effect on why today we are crazy

And none of this was for any good reason

They were just dark and breathing

To ease the guilt now for all of this treatment

Constant stereotypes are needed

So if I celebrate how big that my dick is, bricks that I’m flippin’

Clips that I’m stickin’, chicks that I’m hittin’, I’m playing my position

But if I teach a kid to be a mathematician, messin’ with the schism

How they gonna fill a prison when materialism is nothing but a religion?

What do you think we got now in Britain?

Just like America, private prisons

Prison for profit!

That mean when your kids go jail people make money off it

So keep environments that breed crime

Build more jails at the same time

Market badness to the kids in the rhymes

As long as rich kids ain’t dying, it's fine!

Get em’ to the point where some are so lost

They actually believe that if they don’t celebrate killin’ themselves off

That it’s because they’re soft

Was Malcolm soft? Was Marley soft?

Tell me was Marcus Garvey soft?

Well? Was Mohammed Ali soft? Nah, nah, I think not!

But they want us to think that the road is cool

Being on road is all we can do

We don’t control the wholesale productions

Who benefits from us movin’ the food?

Or thinking there’s no way out of road life

But Malcolm X used to hustle out on the roadside

When Marcus Garvey organised more than six million people

With no Facebook or Twitter

Why is this something you cannot equal? Shit!

One of my homeboys did a ten straight in the box in yard

Now, what’s he doing? Passin’ his doctorate, don’t tell me that it’s too hard!

Who trained you to believe that you’re inferior?

Sungbo Eredo in Nigeria are the remains of an ancient moat

Dug 1,000 years ago

20 metres wide, 70 down

Round the remains of an ancient town

That’s 400 square miles around

400 square miles around

Please, please don’t believe me

It was a documentary on BBC

But we ain’t studyin’ history

Too busy watching MTV

And MTV said, "Wear platinum"

Now everybody wanna go and wear platinum

And MTV said, "Pop magnums"

Now everybody wanna go and pop magnums

If MTV said, "Drink prune juice"

You would start hearing that in tunes soon

"Hey! Today I wore my Cartier

Is it now more important what I got to say?"

Oh and I drive a Mercedes by the way

So everybody listen to what I got to say

Huh, does that make you all happy?

Ah but shit my head’s still nappy

Think for myself, still some mad at me

But on the mic ain’t not one bad as me

All of this here’s good for the rhymes

Put us in the same place at the same time

And it’s clear to everybody that I’m out of my mind

Some of these guys are runnin’ out of their rhymes

Clear to everybody that has got ears

I’m the guy that they just might fear

They wanna get near but they can’t have a peer

Ah dear I’m hard liquor you’re just like beer

Front on the kid for another five years

Come to my shows and some cry tears

It mean that much to em’, it’s a movement!

I don’t speak for myself but a unit

Black, white, man, woman, anyone that respects truth we put in

Dudes are like no dinner with just puddin’

Yeah you’re sweet but no substance puddin’

You could never ever be with a level on

Our songs get outplayed out there in Lebanon

We speak for the people properly

Not for the old fat guys in offices

And the girls love him, it ain’t fair

He can’t even be bothered to comb his hair

Anyway that’s enough kissin’ my own arse

Back to the more important task of being so shower

I got half the hood screaming, “Knowledge is Power!”

And I ain’t saying that will change rap

But I do know this for a fact

Right now there’s a yout' on your block

With his hand on his cock and his face screwed up

Swear he don’t care, don’t give a fuck

That he won’t let nobody call his bluff

But the words go in

Open up your chakra

Because once that’s happened there’s no going back

Once you start to see what is really happening

Who the enemy you should be attackin’ is

So read, read, read!

Stuck on the block, read, read!

Sittin’ in the box, read, read!

Don’t let them say what you can achieve

'Cause when people are enslaved

One of the first things they do is stop them reading

'Cause it is well understood that intelligent people will take their freedom

'Cause if we knew our power we would understand that we can’t be held down

If we knew our power, we would not elevate not one of these clowns

If we knew our power, we wouldn’t get arrogant when we get two pennies

If we knew our power, we would see what everybody sees, that we’re rich already!

But never mind MCs go run for your mummy

I’m hungry, I run for my tummy

That’s enough, back to worshipping money

I’m off, back to the study!