Listen all-y-all to the tale which i tattle
Its the rap couplet version of the battle of seattle
It starts off there, it goes to - where?
All depends on the masses and the speed of my prattle

If you're wondrin ‘bout the form and the style of the verse
It’s sub-Beasties mac’ronic and it’s really a curse -
It’s hard enuff to think this stuff
Without having up to rhyme it
But don't diss my project until you can define it

As i was sayin (i have to speak like this
I'm well educated but i'm takin the piss
Out of bouge-wah whitey movements
That really might be great
If they just weren't so lib-ral and confused about the state

Why you talkin like that? you still may enquire
It’s just to match the form to the content I require
If rap was once (Chuck D said it) C-N-N of the ghetto
Then maybe now it fits to the middleclass falsetto -
A Beastie's kind of whine, an Eminem reflexive
Fit to state the travails of the NGO collective
Ok so its feeble and stretchy, i know
But check out my logic cos it’s good to go)

Yeh, as i was saying, well i mean to relate
The globalization protests that you've heard about of late
Like Milton and Wordsworth another time implied
Bliss it was, in that dawn, to be alive -
J18 and, later, S-26
Gave even the dubious some kind of kicks
But what happened next
Was rather more vexed
Sometimes it makes me wonder if we aren’t just hexed

The protests kind of grew
Or at least kept rollin’
But the tv got bored and the message got stolen
Now everytime i touch the dial on my tv set
I hear sucker re-presenters squeakin
‘Drop the debt’

Now - don’t get me wrong - I don’t say debt is good
But debt’s just one problem in our global ‘hood
The supranational bodies by now you ought to know
Include the I-M-F and dubbya T-O
And they learnt to speak the language
Of the protests - acting fly -
& the way they all have Kleined it
It could make you cry -
They’ve broken down the message
Til it’s just more lube
For shafting of the broiling, mixedup multitood
They call for small corrections and say it’s gonna get better
But they’re pissing on the spirit
As they siphon off the letter

Meanwhile ‘on the ground’, as reporters say
The resisters keep resistin’, don’t just bleed away
But the question where to next?
Has yet to get an answer,
& the one ‘bout org-nization
Is as serious as cancer

We’ve had Porto Alegre and the World Social Forum
Yet with 50,000 delegates
The press still ignore ‘em
Coming up real soon is the FTAA
And even May the first isn’t far away
There’s stickers going up on subway walls
And thousands of Canadians will be having a ball

But though its all good - as some have suggested
There’s more to counterpower than getting self arrested
Locked in a cell
And treated like scum
While the working-class stays sidelined
And the press stay schtum

Even if the protests do get summits deferred
Shut down, cut short and really unnerved
The suits can go to Qatar
Where human rights don’t matter
And plot out how to privatize ‘til sovereignty shatter

Activists, theorists, blue collars and greens
All get together, still making the scenes
But where it’s all headed is far from clear
Should they centralise tha massive
Or just disappear?
Formed like Vo-tron, political Transformerz,
Are they robots in disguise or superfly performerz?

Are they out to abolish, augment or refine
The global instituitions they say are unkind?
Can capit-al-ism grow a human face
Or should we start from the assumption it’s as toxic Mace?

MCs like me just don’t really know
Where all this scheduled protest, summits, rumbles will go
But it seems like these days
There’s a kind of malaise
In the place where, before, there was dawn’s bliss haze...

Thanks to Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and all of my crew
With a big shout to Mike Hardt ‘n’ Toni Negri too
That’s the end of my rap so ‘til the next edition
Respect to the reader, hope you dig my mission