Chant Down American Babylon

(This is for Bob Marley and Kingston; for Robert O. Self and the Black Panthers; and mostly for the music industry and all those that contribute to its annual $7,000,000,000 income)


Chant down American Babylon
with their contracts of pointed fingers,
headlined with "I WANT YOU!"
Hungry for obsequious Negroes with
addictive personalities,
allergic to the dark
and medicated by virulent limelight.
Tasty.
Squeezed over contracts of alphabet soup.
And you
YES YOU
listen to these sleepers
and now Babylon owns you too.

Chant down American Babylon
with their hush policies on the truth.
If you strive for enlightenment of all who are worthy,
they'll use the strategies of Sun Tzu.
Teachers
thinkers
speakers
they'll erase your lyrics
if you don't swear by their Ingsoc.

Chant down American Babylon
who seeks to steal, kill and destroy
for the sake of entertaining many.
Teaching us queens to use our bodies
and our chicanery
to win over dudes until they chuck us for season 2.
Now listen up carefully because American Babylon wants you
YES YOU.

Chant down American Babylon
with a Gregorian-Igbo stew of drone and pulse.
Entrance all that will come to this million man march
where my people will sign contracts with truth.

Chant down American Babylon
that supplies the vulnerable
with sex, drugs and booze
and then calls over their friends in media
for a dehumanizing photo shoot.
Artists, they're using you.

Chant down American Babylon
and fill their ears with the hope of dark skin--
the most sultry hope there is--
a dark musicianship
part innate and part inherited.
Sing your dark songs of despair
conspiracy
of the inevitable coup d'etats
that will finally bring Babylon down.
Beleaguer Babylon,
for we will not wait for deliverance.

Chant it down children,
Babylon and all its slaves.
Make way for an old message through new prophets
and old prophets appearing from darkness
together
singing in monophonic concordance,
chanting down this American Babylon obstreperously.

Chant down American Babylon
you valiant,
beautiful children of Zion,
you sophisticated,
refined children of harmony.