Fire In The Booth Lyrics

Fire In The Booth by 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
• Growin’ up, got a little caught up
• But that ain’t even half of my life
• I was 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 schoolin’
• You would call gangsters
• But 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 cos we are thugs
• 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 f*** 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
• Its 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,
• Dissin’ 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 f***ed up, lethargy’s a crime
• We can all fight with our brothers over crumbs,
• Far harder to fight the one who makes guns
• We can all talk sh** and get two dollars
• Far 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
• Don’t get confused, I’m far from broke
• All that you see me do I own
• But I wont 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 owns 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
• Gimme 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 a
• rmed robbery and murder all put together
• You can say they’re just locking up thugs,
• 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 50k 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, 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
• Day reel passes, picnic baskets
• Even gave kids the day off school
• To go see a lynchin’
• 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 sell the kids of the richer 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’re 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 letter box
• And of course the cops did so much about it(!)
• Daily, up to the 80s
• People spittin’ into my pram cos’ 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 and 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 no longer our religion?
• What do you think we got now in Britain?
• Just like America, private prisons
• Prisons 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 its 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 Malcom 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 6million people
• With no Facebook or Twitter
• Why is this something you cannot equal?
• Shiiiiit!
• 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 1000 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?
• Ahh 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 dinner with no puddin’
• Yeah you’re sweet but no substance puddin’
• You could never ever be with a level on
• Our songs get out played 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 hands on his balls, face screwed up
• Swear he don’t care, don’t give a fuck
• That he won’t let nobody caught his block
• But the words go in
• Open your shackles
• 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
• Cos when people are enslaved
• One of the first things they do is stop them reading
• Cos’ it is well understood
• that intelligent people will take their freedom
• Cos’ 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!

Lyrics taken from UndergroundHH, check out our full database of Akala Lyrics.