Akala – Behind My Painted Smile Lyrics

• Behind my painted smile when all the revolutionary noise is nothing but a lost little boy
• Confused and insecure, arrogant and oversure
• An egotistical prick so come on please praise me more
• It's great that my music bettered you
• but I contemplate murder every day so don't put me on a pedestal
• Plus truly, this is just the vehicle, the music just runs through me
• In my better moments I could let the universe use me

• Behind my smile there's generations of pain, self-hatred, ingrained miseducated my brain
• Decimated the place where my dead relations were slain
• Not just physically but mentally penetrated our veins
• What you got inside hasn't gotta die once it can die a lot of times, that I promise my son
• Analyse every song that I've done - tryna fight colonialism with a colonised tongue

• Here I stand again
• Living in sin
• Caught up, in the dream
• Behind the painted smile

• Behind my painted smile is the most painful grimace
• This mental prison I live in cause I am so conditioned
• By my privilege, what a strange contradiction
• To grow up brown in Britain and know that your living
• Was paid for by a carcass that resembles yours
• Born in the heart of the empire
• You're worth more than I was just like you
• But less then the native ones, raised by my mum but in this world I am a father's son

• Behind my painted smile, a very flawed human being
• Done many things that I regret and never knew the reason
• What do you believe in, truth or freedom or are you deceiving?
• I don't wanna die in prostration to European's
• They say the answer is within you and nowhere else
• Understand the vision man on a mission to know himself
• This is for my co-defendants no retreat and no surrender
• You probably think that we don't remember Ota Benga

• Here I stand again
• Living in sin
• Caught up, in the dream
• Behind the painted smile

• The smile is painted on my face is tainted by a frown
• Picture in the pocket's of blood that decorate the town
• Trigger jum bullets sung and guns hum
• Then everyone that's dead was somebody's someone

• Behind my painted smile I feel like a naked child
• Maybe rapping ain't for now cos my passion is fading out
• Up early though I search and roam along this dirty road
• Just another traveller taking a long journey home

• All this talk of intervention to protect on what is the intention
• Same as it ever was the colonial past and present
• And more respect for most of the right wingers
• Than the paternalistic patronising liberal bigot

• Our way of life is so divine, we should intervene
• Select war and export the British dream
• Behind cinema screens there's much that isn't seen
• George Clooney war movies never bring our children peace

• Yo fam, you ever wake up and just feel like fucking off
• And never coming back to this place and just cutting off?

• All the time, almost did last year the trouble was the bloody cops
• Had me running in and out the bloody dock

• I been there brother, though I don't promote it in this rap shit
• I ain't a stranger to having my back on their blue plastic

• Can't keep us captive

• We see the tactics

• To keep us passive

• We beat the fascists

• Release the classics

• And reach the masses!

• Here I stand again
• Living in sin
• Caught up, in the dream
• Behind the painted smile