Species of Property - Busdriver

Everything is alright

Everything is okay, okay

Everything is alright

Everything is okay

Watcha gonna do with that beat

Watcha gonna do with that beat

Watcha gonna do with that beat

Watcha gonna do with that beat

They’re telling me that the body is free

But we’re the species of property

They hit the niggas with them hidden fees

They hit them niggas like a timpani

They telling me that my body is free

But we’re the species of property

The popo still gotta follow me

While I wear my sneakers and a cotton tee

Everybody’s gotta play to win

Lowered down to my shade of skin

They’re trapping out at the Days Inn

And you’re all thumbs, you’re all thumbs

Decorative African skull

Full of olive pits and wine corks

Own my judge and high court

And you’re all hung, you’re all hung

You’re all hung

Yeah, whoa

When you end up getting capital

The cobwebs in your shadow, gotta dabble with your nerve center

When your life is derated

And you’re feeling isolated, that’s when you become a bird letter

I’m a parasitic bitch

Eating asparagus tips while obscuring that money pit

You were still a televised veteran

Return to the center with your surname ‘Honey dip'

This our disheveled, cell zombie shell

For that high society ride-along

But what do we own, I get deboned

So I bemoan that siren song

This rougish Moor than the underscore

Is inebriated at the oven door

With a sputtering core chanting

«nigga we did it, nigga we did it»

They’re telling me that the body’s free

But we the species of property

The popo gotta follow me

While I’m wearing my sneakers and a cotton tee

They’re telling me that we’re not free

But I’m the species of property

They got my essence under lock and key

No no you’re mistaken not me

Not me

No no, you’re mistaken not me

Yes, you

Yes, you

My son asked me what a nigga was, and if I was one was he one too?

And what it meant to be of nigga-stock

How can we define this nigga that we resemble

Or are qualities lost in the abstraction of prayer

Did we become or were we always this, and what was this?

Where did the border between us and the world merge?

No one knows

Thankfully we do know the storms that forge the idea

The definition is uninterrupted

The nigga is the variable

The nigga is the unknowable

A mislabeled parcel of human electricity

Prehistoric in form, beyond time and essence

I wrote that for Baltimore