Guante & Big Cats - A Pragmatist’s Guide to Revolution [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

[Verse 1]
I’m fightin’ on ‘til my life is gone
Even when my version of health insurance is orange juice and tiger balm
Even when my attention is so divided
Between rappin’ and writin’ and activism and survivin’
And at any given time so many of us are new to this
But you ain’t gotta stop listening to ludacris
And you ain’t gotta dress a certain way
Ride your bike in wintertime, shop at the co-op or ever turn away
From who you really are… this movement doesn’t need perfect
It just needs us to start workin’
Radical means you have hope
And sometimes ya vote for it, most of the time, though, ya don’t
So this is for the ballot, the bullet, the bulletin and the boycott
For the hand to hand, and the door to door
More and more, it’s growin’ in popularity
We don’t say peace, we say solidarity

[Hook]
We don’t care about the clothes you wear
Don’t care about the kind of car you drive
We don’t need any more heroes
We just need to organize
Don’t care about the books you read
Or the revolution in your head
Don’t put your fists in the air, use ‘em
To build something real instead

[Verse 2]
Fuck a conspiracy theory that ain’t right
The worst they do is always in plain sight
I ain’t concerned about black helicopters
It wasn’t the illuminati who shot sean and oscar
I ain’t looking for symbols on dollar bills and monuments
Or reading nostradamus’s prophecies of apocalypse
I got enough problems in my neighborhood
.unemployment, schools underfunded so take a good
Look at the books it doesn’t add up so what’s up
It doesn’t take a new world order to fuck us
…so flip that switch off
I don’t think 9/11 was an inside job
And even if it was suspicious, our mission is the same
Resist, revolt, rebel, remember every name
We live, we vote, we yell the pressure doesn’t change
Whether on republicans or democrats or space lizards

[Hook]

[Verse 3]
I got a friend who ran for city council and he got elected
Got a friend who ran for school board and got rejected
But in the process, learned about the process
Wrote a couple grants, now she runs a non-profit
I got a friend who never went to college
But knows the first and last names of everyone in his housing project
…it starts with the basics
I got another friend who throws parties in his basement
And basically that’s just a baseline
Power’s a hundred people in the same place at the same time
…right but what you gonna do with it?
I got a friend who knows what the revolution is
And knows that though the music is beautiful
It’s the people that it brings together who are better
And the senators and representatives only bend
To the will of the real change-makers, my friends

[Hook]