Lyrics Time for Law - Swordplay

Time for Law

When they said «god is dead» it didn’t really matter
No one really listened and the law didn’t really develop
Anything in the way of new ethical standards.
(Yeah.)
The punks sang along «all cops are bastards, no gods, no masters»
So who’s gonna lead these sheep to pasture?
World speeds up, sheep go faster
And normative theory of course most normally prompts laughter
Arguments are lost often on a word’s rhetorical baggage
And the law is written to be read backwards
Take a picture of the before and after
Doesn’t really matter how I rap now
It’s time for law for this former rapper
Straight A student with a B+ average mitigating disaster
Get a J.D. to Raise High the Roofbeam and see Seymour hang from the rafters
And it really shouldn’t matter
Where your house falls on the city parcel mapper
This is American society
Tell me how high can I climb that ladder?
And the law is a strait jacket.
Escape may take practice
Most folks never figure out a way from the prison cell that they’re trapped in
But money might make things happen
So El Chapo is under the cactus
While others pay to have attorneys come tunnel their way out of tax brackets
It’s time for law for all capitalists
Never mind the people with the matchsticks
They’re just the madmen on the grass holding TNT and explosive packages
Bet ya can’t move past it
To make a better world, try to first imagine it
But a little panic among the masses, suddenly another bad law has been enacted
And the law is about who has access
Some laws meant to be redacted
When I say it’s time for law, I mean it’s time I diversify my tactics
Work alongside activists, then represent em when they punch fascists
I listen to them as they go on for hours, they talk about bad praxis
I’m here in the center of the Empire
I’m running on low bandwidth
I navigate a David Bowie-type Labyrinth with only the aid of public transit
And I’ll rub shoulders with anyone
Even if it seems antithetical
Cos I pay attention to the color of the collar on the shirt of the criminal
Their cellphones roaming, their vacations in Italy
They may sit seaside but still have hallucinations of their enemies
And eventually commit suicide on their multi-million-dollar properties
I’m in the heart of the city, I listen to its tiny little symphony
See, the law is a mechanism of death
A guillotine hovering over your free speech faculties
Controlling your language, wooden planks pressed into the neck
A Tiananmen square pedestrian, a Dalai Lama born into bondage
I take the Hobbesian view often, but even then
I still lean a little bit communist
And the law stretches.
the law bends
The law’s full of publicly available e-mails and text messages from old friends
A treacherous angel rendering litigation outcomes implausible
Sometimes justice is not honorable
Other times, justice is just not possible