Music for a Sunday: Chilean rap fights back

Chilean rap group Portavoz (“Spokesperson”) questions the “popularity” of the Piñera government. Here’s my translation of the lyrics:

They want to crush you, kicked and tossed out like a plasta*
Liquored up and doped until you say basta
Anguished and drugged with cocaine paste, no doubt
You’ve asked why a dictatorship lets hard drugs in

They want you working far away from any union
Working just cool, without disobeying orders
They want you down lower than the fart of a guanaco
If you protest for reconstruction like the people of Dichato

They want you weighed down with exhaustion and stress
So that afterwords, with control in hand, you’ll watch Morandé on TV
Or the [cop show] “133” so you’ll respect authority
They want you stupefied and caught up in reality

They want us in school, but only to prepare us
To be cheap labor, daddy, under orders
They want the occupation to turn into a drinking binge
It’s no joke, take the struggle seriously and for real

They want you indifferent in the face of the present
Like an inert being, obedient in the face of the manager,
The agent or any director, who represents
The interests and mindset of the the régime of the powerful

They want you to go on navel-gazing
Because divided, we’ll go on forever conquered
They want you, yes, but they want to screw you
Because they want more fresh money and to hang onto power

CHORUS:
Every society has its organization
Which is no coincidence, it has planning
And those who dominate from above are the rich
They want you dominated, rigid, blinded and submissive
And if they want me ignorant, I’ll inform myself
And if they want me obedient, I won’t buy it
And if they want me destroyed I won’t stand for it
Capitalism, the cataclysm in which they want you trapped

They want us like a junkie on the corner, a zombie of the store window
A dumbass with no opinion, conquering your life
Competing even with your buddies all the time
Conditioned by their fucking ideology

They want more patches, but no structural changes
They want you to march, but without touching their property
They want us to protest tamely, like idiots
And when they get back in power, they want to kill us by the thousands

They want you to cry if a TV show host dies
And that you ignore the murder of Manuel Gutiérrez
They want you to believe the police will protect you
When in fact they’re the hunting-falcons of the bourgeois

They want you to be happy with two or three fucking gambas**
While senators make 16 million a month
They want you to read the papers, the TV and the news
That they’re the bosses and owners of, the same ones who

Want you to think your vote is powerful in truth
And vote for whom you will, the same few will rule
The Concerta*** or the right, it’s all the same shit
They represent big business, brother, remember

They want to go on robbing and stealing legally
But we won’t stand for it, now our people are protesting
And while those on high are accumulating capital
We down below are accumulating rage and the strength to wipe them out.

*plasta = a dull, lazy person
**gambas = “shrimps”, 100-peso Chilean coins
***Concerta = Concertación, a centre-left Chilean coalition of parties

Linkage added.

Thanks to Rodrigo Uribe for tweeting me that ‘tube!