Time for Law - Swordplay

When they said «god is dead» it didn’t really matter

No one really listened and the law didn’t really develop

Anything in the way of new ethical standards.

(Yeah.)

The punks sang along «all cops are bastards, no gods, no masters»

So who’s gonna lead these sheep to pasture?

World speeds up, sheep go faster

And normative theory of course most normally prompts laughter

Arguments are lost often on a word’s rhetorical baggage

And the law is written to be read backwards

Take a picture of the before and after

Doesn’t really matter how I rap now

It’s time for law for this former rapper

Straight A student with a B+ average mitigating disaster

Get a J.D. to Raise High the Roofbeam and see Seymour hang from the rafters

And it really shouldn’t matter

Where your house falls on the city parcel mapper

This is American society

Tell me how high can I climb that ladder?

And the law is a strait jacket.

Escape may take practice

Most folks never figure out a way from the prison cell that they’re trapped in

But money might make things happen

So El Chapo is under the cactus

While others pay to have attorneys come tunnel their way out of tax brackets

It’s time for law for all capitalists

Never mind the people with the matchsticks

They’re just the madmen on the grass holding TNT and explosive packages

Bet ya can’t move past it

To make a better world, try to first imagine it

But a little panic among the masses, suddenly another bad law has been enacted

And the law is about who has access

Some laws meant to be redacted

When I say it’s time for law, I mean it’s time I diversify my tactics

Work alongside activists, then represent em when they punch fascists

I listen to them as they go on for hours, they talk about bad praxis

I’m here in the center of the Empire

I’m running on low bandwidth

I navigate a David Bowie-type Labyrinth with only the aid of public transit

And I’ll rub shoulders with anyone

Even if it seems antithetical

Cos I pay attention to the color of the collar on the shirt of the criminal

Their cellphones roaming, their vacations in Italy

They may sit seaside but still have hallucinations of their enemies

And eventually commit suicide on their multi-million-dollar properties

I’m in the heart of the city, I listen to its tiny little symphony

See, the law is a mechanism of death

A guillotine hovering over your free speech faculties

Controlling your language, wooden planks pressed into the neck

A Tiananmen square pedestrian, a Dalai Lama born into bondage

I take the Hobbesian view often, but even then

I still lean a little bit communist

And the law stretches.

the law bends

The law’s full of publicly available e-mails and text messages from old friends

A treacherous angel rendering litigation outcomes implausible

Sometimes justice is not honorable

Other times, justice is just not possible