From the recording RIPE
I think this karmic political satire speaks for itself. It was inspired both by my coffee habit and by a newspaper article about the use of child slaves on some cocoa plantations in Africa. We tend to think those days are over, so it is always shocking to find its still going on and as a coffee drinker, that I' m contributing to it. Fair trade seems best way. But hard to stop people buying cheap. Hopefully some political awareness and pressure can put a stop to it. I wanted to show the interconnectedness of things and how things haven't changed really in a few thousand years.
Lyrics
Bitter black coffee in the morning time
Sends a rush into my heart and mind.
Gives me the illusion that I’m feeling fine;
Gonna kill me one of these times.
Grown in a land far away
By labor forced with little pay
Bitter black coffee from the roots to the grounds
A bitter black up from bitter black downs.
Bitter luxuries from bitter blacks strife
Gonna come back a take my life.
Bridge:
Like some cancer inside of me.
White sugar, petroleum cream
Diabetes, clogged arteries,
A karmic kind of disease.
Spoken:
Well it’s morning at the ranch, and you and your model wife are in your terri-cloth bathrobes, sipping your mocha java. Ah, not a worry in the world! At least in the coffee commercial that is. In reality there is that nagging possibility of a major uprising among the locals whose land you appropriated for the plantation.
Actually, if truth be told, you’re the one causing all the worries in the world!
Julio, Ahmed and Mangwe are worried if they’ll make enough to feed themselves, never mind their families. Worried if they’ll make it through the day without being beaten. Worried if they’ll ever make it to the ripe old age of 15 or 16. And surviving these worries there is the question of escaping slavery on what was once their native soil. Should they join the Marxists, the Fundamentalists, the child armies?
But Nah! Don’t you worry about such things. Hell you own half the country and make more in one month than the entire annual national GNP and your juntas are well paid! You are providing jobs after all! Then again, there is that little question of the soul and the camel not passing through the eye of needle. But Nah! You’ve read your Leo Strauss; religion is for the masses! And you know that no man is truly rich unless he owns his own army! Just like Crassus said before his insatiable greed led him and 10,000 of his fellow Romans off to be slaughtered in the sands of the Syrian desert.
Bitter black coffee in the evening time
Sends its poison to my heart and mind
Blood from a land whose people are enslaved
Someday gonna drive me to my grave.
What you give and take goes around
A bitter black up comes bitter black down.
Bitter grey smoke we take into our lungs,
We all know where it comes from:
The people whose land we stole,
Call it Montezuma’s other hole,
Bitter black chocolate from an african farm
Run by white companies far from the harm
Of the children kidnapped or bought for slaves
One day that chocolate will take you to your grave
What you give and take oh well it goes around
Your bitter black up will be your bitter black down.
All’s connected we forget but know.
We end up eating all the fruit we grow.
Bitter black coffee, bitter grey smoke
Big white devil’s gonna choke.
Nara, 2001