It is incendiary. It is angry. It is everything that we all feel right now, if we empathize in any way with those in New Orleans and beyond.
Ahe-yuhe-yu
We shall live again.
We shall live again.
But in the meantime:
Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
Baby got big and baby get bigger.
Baby get something. Baby get more.
Baby, baby, baby was a rock-and-roll nigger.
Oh, look around you, all around you,
riding on a copper wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
(Lenny!)
Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
You know she got big. Well, she’s gonna get bigger.
Baby got a hand; got a finger on the trigger.
Baby, baby, baby is a rock-and-roll nigger.
Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
(those who have suffered, understand suffering,
and thereby extend their hand
the storm that brings harm
also makes fertile
blessed is the grass
and herb and the true thorn and light)
I was lost in a valley of pleasure.
I was lost in the infinite sea.
I was lost, and measure for measure,
love spewed from the heart of me.
I was lost, and the cost,
and the cost didn’t matter to me.
I was lost, and the cost
was to be outside society.
Jimi Hendrix was a nigger.
Jesus Christ and Grandma, too.
Jackson Pollock was a nigger.
Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger,
nigger, nigger, nigger.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, if you’re looking,
that’s where you’ll find me.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society. (Repeat)
Patti Smith, “Rock n Roll Nigger”, Easter, copyright 1978.
30 Years ago. This song was written thirty fucking years ago. What the fuck has changed. It has gotten worse. We now exterminate cities. We now withhold insurance from doctors who want to go help those in need. We now prevent food and water from getting to the “niggers” dying by the thousands in New Orleans. Why? Who the fuck knows.
And we wonder why they are “outside of society”. A large portion of the US population is “outside of society”. They have fucking nothing. Their life is a living hell.
And now, in New Orleans, they are being exterminated because they are “outside of society”.
Fuck this country. I mean it. Fuck this country. “We” have continually made excuses for why we can’t take care of our own. “We” have continually obscured the plight of the impoversihed in this country. “We” have been happy [even if uneasily so] to enable economic decimation of a third of our population.
And now “we’re” openly killing them.
Fuck this country.
This country no longer has anything to do with what those who wrote our constitution envisioned. It is a fascist economic state.
Welcome to our fucking country: Land of the deluded and the exploited, and now, the murdered.