Danger Mouse & Murs :: "Paint By Numbers"

Above is the youtube-d version of a definite FSE of mine, "Paint By Numbers" by Danger Mouse & Murs from a mixtape collaboration of theirs, sometime around 2005. The lyrics are below, and I believe every bit as relevant today as they were 3 years ago. Danger Mouse's free (and legal) download.com page has this song available for download (for free), as well as a couple others he did with Jemini around the same time period.

Now in the news this evening, a hostage situation quickly turned to mass murder as the capitol lost its patience. An investment banker, frustrated beyond sanity, walked through his office and started shooting people randomly. 32nd floor, downtown metropolis, thousands in the area cleared from their offices. Even the newscaster had a tear in his eye as he reported on the loss of ten innocent lives.

Now miles overseas, let me paint a scene: an eleven year-old boy holds an M-16 and he’s shooting out the door of his one room home cause earlier that night, his dad was popped in the dome. Now he protects his mom and two sisters all on his own, cause guerillas want the local government overthrown. So he led them to a ditch, in the still of the night, under a hundred dead bodies they all hid, full of fright; and this happens everyday—different family, same plight—but nobody gives a [fuck] cause the victims ain’t [white].

But everybody makes a scene when a mid-western teen is abducted, and it sucks—she could have been a prom queen. But, let the same [shit] happen off Martin Luther King, and they’ll quickly write it off as some gang bang thing. So I’ma say what I mean and mean what I say, and I know the race card is a mean one to play, but:

If one more dies, then it’s one too many, in these third world countries where they kill so many. [Fuck] a third world war, it ain’t a second to waste, when no one knows what we’re fighting for in the first place.

Now I could stop [bull-shitting] and throw the real Molotov, and compare the black slave trade to the Holocaust. But they were both atrocities, there’s hope for stopping these…crimes against humanity from happening again. But AIDS has killed how many millions of these African men? As soon as it gets attention, we’re distracted again—by what? J-Lo’s wedding!? How the stock market varies!? Pro basketball!? Or will Bush beat Kerry!?

Let Michael Jackson be, and let gay men marry. The world is so much bigger than this [bullshit], it’s scary…how we all think we’re free but we’re trapped in a box, but compassion is the key that’ll open up the lock. So [fuck] Kobe Bryant’s [cock] and the white chick he stuck it in. [Fuck] Democrats and [motherfuck] Republicans. It’s about that time for real rap to rise up again, up out the rut that these suckers done stuck it in.

But if one more dies, then it’s one too many, in these third world countries where they kill so many. [Fuck] a third world war, it ain’t a second to waste, when no one knows what we’re fighting for in the first place.