Crass - You Can Be Who? lyrics

rate me

Don't want a life of lies and pretence

Don't want to play at attack and defense

Just want my own life. I want to be free

So you can be you, and I can be me.

Respectable businessman smart and secure

Eat the fat of the land that they robbed from the poor

The butcher is smiling as he brings down the knife

As he cuts up the meat, he thinks of the wife

As eminent psychiatrists suffer paranoid fits

The ones they call mad have to pick up the bits

The preachers speaks calmly, says it's love that we lack

While his imaginary dagger is held at our back

Don't want a life of lies and pretence

Don't want to play at attack and defense

Just want my own life. I want to be free

So you can be you, and I can be me.

In bed you're the master or mistress, who cares?

Abusing each other as your work off your fears

Go climb a mountain, go fuck a scout

Avoidance of self is what it's about

Pretence and illusion to avoid who you are

Don't work on yourself, just polish the car

Switch on the telly afraid you might find

That as well as a body you've also a mind

Cheap glossy surface to cover the lie

Cheap easy answers to the what, where and why

Media drivel, yet you still watch the screen

Life ain't for real, it's a magazine

Conned from the start but hang onto the lies

You're a slave to the cathode ray paradise

You don't want the world, you just want the pics

Media junkies, you'd die for a fix

Don't want a life of lies and pretence

Don't want to play at attack and defense

Just want my own life. I want to be free

So you can be you, and I can be me.

So you say you'll regret it, well that's maybe a start

But it's so fucking easy to act out a part

Say you'll reject it, but still toe the line

Conning yourself that you're doing just fine

Anarchy, freedom, more games to play?

Fight war, not wars? Well it's something to say

Slogans and badges worn without thought

Instant identities so cheaply bought

Well freedom ain't product, it just isn't fun

You're looking for peace your work's just begun

Fighting oppression, aggression and hate

Fighting warmongers before it's too late

We've got to fight back to show that we care

For so many years we've been silenced by fear

Our lives have been ruined by liars and fools

The powerful and greedy who bind us with rules

Politicians and preachers who bind us with laws

Stolen our peace and given us wars

They've used us as means to their own violent ends

Turned us against each other, made foes out of friends

They've distorted, perverted, polluted our lives

They've brainwashed the world with their sordid beliefs

They seek to possess, control and corrupt

If it's freedom we're after, they've got to be stopped.