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No Absolution

from You Won't Like the Answer by Buggy Jive

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lyrics

She sho don't feel like no criminal
But sho nuff it's a crime
She don't believe it's political
When she speaks her mind

And the words she aint allowed to say
And the jokes she aint allowed to make
She ain't woke but she's wide awake
To her persecution.

I can give no absolution.

She has no amends to make, cuz
Some of her best friends
She can't wait to transcend this race stuff
She so tired of pretending

And the words she aint allowed to say
And the jokes she aint allowed to make
She ain't woke but she's wide awake
For the colorblind revolution.

I can give no absolution.

That ain’t my job.

When she get mad she disturbing the peace
Waving black and blue flags for the Thought Police
She think she ain't bad but I got the receipts
I got the receipts I gots all of the deets
I might take ya to school for a literature class
But I ain't not here to absolve yo ass.
I ain't here not to absolve yo ass.

That is not my job.

Henry and Alex all up in each other's faces
As I recoil from the words on the pages
I'm tryna sing to make louder the silence
But David feels threatened by "rhetorical violence."

Apologias for those who wrote these books,
For those who’d be shocked to see me in this room
And Marlow sees darkies at the river bed
And Orlando swings swords at a blackamoor's head
Remember what F Scott's letter said
Remember what Eliot's letters said
Faulkner fights for M-I-crooked-crooked-letter-I
Long before he was asking "If I, If I…”
They were men and women of their time.
They were men and women of their time.
Poor little victims of their time!
And they beg off retribution.

I can give no absolution.

That is not my job.

RADIO GUY: Conrad wrote, “My task is, above all, to make you see.”

CHINUA ACHEBE: This is absurd!

RADIO GUY: Conrad wrote, “My task is, above all, to make you see.”

ACHEBE: This is absurd! If someone without knowledge, without any inside knowledge of the people he’s trying to describe, can get away with it, I’ll try my hand at it.

RADIO GUY: “The horror. The horror.”

ACHEBE: This is absurd!

RADIO GUY: Conrad wrote, “My task is, above all, to make you see.”

ACHEBE: This is absurd!

RADIO GUY: Or was he, as the Nigerian writer China Achebe put it —

ACHEBE: This is absurd!

RADIO GUY: — guilty of “preposterous and perverse arrogance in reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind.”

SUGGESTED READING

https://polonistyka.amu.edu.pl/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/259954/Chinua-Achebe,-An-Image-of-Africa.-Racism-in-Conrads-Heart-of-Darkness.pdf

https://softmorningcity.wordpress.com/tag/f-scott-fitzgerald/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/02/wallace-stevens-after-lunch

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/william-faulkners-demons

https://www.girlsatlibrary.com/a-woolf-in-progressive-clothing

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/11/06/the-trouble-with-heart-of-darkness

credits

from You Won't Like the Answer, released May 11, 2021

license

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about

Buggy Jive Albany, New York

BUGGY JIVE is a soul rock singer-songwriter quietly uploading music from a basement somewhere in Upstate New York.

Equal parts Zeppelin and D’Angelo and Prince and Joni in sound and sensibility, his lyrics often mine the literature of the past to make sense of the present – from Ellison to Morrison to Eliot to Didion.

“Literary Kravitz,” as some say.
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