Diaspora - Youngblood Brass Band

O siri jogou jogou

O siri chamou chamou

O siri tocou tocou

Foi para jogar

La-la-e la-e-la-e-la-la

Capoeira, ladainha

La-la-e la-e-la-e-la-la

Sangue novo, sangue joven

Then:

I saw senegalese shaman spinning seance spirituals

Where the gods sat back and smiled at their singing child

I heard century-old griots disclose millennia-old secrets

To sleeping capoeiristas under metropolitan trees

I tasted goat’s blood gumbo up in congo square cook-offs

In front of armstrong’s bell and knew it was worth the wait

I inhaled government-manufactured crack / stacked skyscraper wax

Counted the rings on records / passed peyote to the grand canyon

And called it hip-hop

Consoling with consonance / remote-controlled confidence

Its roots in a continent assumed life-incompetent

That’s a hell of a sentence / and a sentence to hell

In the noise of the now i’m too deafened to tell

Shango said we fake his dance very well

But the anger is remembered and amends are hard to come by

Gazing second-hand at glory blurry

Bolstered by their minds' wine and pelvic thrust sustenance

Oshun sent her smell bedside / now i’m d.u.i of ancestry

And what’s not quite guilt / more like regret

It’s not my fight but i act like a vet

Then obatala awoke / advising truth and rest

So here we float between decent prose and the present’s constant wind

Waxing nonchalant on misappropriated dark continents

Wondering why two great human abnormalities are compassion and common sense

Throwing secret new orleans/yoruba signs while scholars condescend

The spirits have left the room and i’m left to write their scent

Despite aforementioned salvation

The pen cannot repent

Now:

Calm encased in cadence / la bateria playing fourteen times nameless

Righteous revelers pounding dry pavement

To hear the earth answer back rocks that beat

Jones-ing elves and metro-gnomes summon sleeping giants

Living crowds coalesce and explode

Lifting the shroud of death from wrecked homes

And wave my writes like an eternally burning flag

Always fire-colored and -covered

Coveted summer cavorting with lovers too loud for flesh

The type i haven’t met yet but i’m sure you’re becoming

After us, nothing / before screams, humming

Dream something and we’ll play it / next melody drifting downriver

Sun-dressed and -kissed and -shone for new b-boys

No one ever dies / not in my sky

We are soaring so simply it’s missed by reason and exists as silent song

Artists wake up human to put attitude and violence on / put off tomorrow

What say we say what we mean to feel more often?

I’m real sure i’m less shot

I steal words from hip-hop like 'what' / but i love it like you

Don’t you love it when it’s like you?

And we say 'that's my jam' because it is

Because it’s like that when it likes you

Giving group affirmation like 'yes y’all' / and it goes on

Because you don’t stop / because if you did

The world would fall apart and these beats would return to the womb

Of the universe where they’d wait another six billion years

For life to sound like 'boom-bap' again

So move