Songtext Do you see my skin through the flames? Blood Orange

Do you see my skin through the flames?

Frustration and depression breaks me down
Descending like they wanted on the ground
The further our journey the less you care
That's why you laugh at Kanye when he's talking in the chair
But the same conversation but replaced
Is good enough for laughs or a smile on your face
Happy to be singing all our songs to survive
But when we need help, you don't get off 'til five
It's powerful to feel so alone in a group

Let me break this down for you
Tell you how we feel again
Your fear is all you hold
So when you see me it's not fair
I have nothing left to give
When you don't notice what is wrong
Charleston left me broken down
But it's just another day to you
I have nothing left to give you
And I'm too tired
To even talk about it
While watching the fire
Tasting pain coming from a place of truth
To be an other in a messy world
To feel like giving in another turn
You wouldn't listen if I told you
So how can I become anyone?

When I was in Paris I was sitting in a cab
And before we could pull out, four plain clothes officers
Pulled up beside us and got out of the car
And put a badge to the backseat where I was sitting
And asked me to get out
And then the Marais where I was renting an apartment
In front of the cafe that I'd been going to
They proceeded to humiliate me, and saying that I was suspicious
And uh, ha, yeah it got pretty shitty
So I understand what you're going through
Being surrounded by friends of privilege
Who don't get it, when we're in a world where
A lot of faces don't look like us
So I understand what you're going through man

So I was looking up what my lost name means
What its origin is
My last name is Hynes, H-Y-N-E-S
Gets spelled a number of different ways
H-I-N-E-S, the most common spelling
And um, I found that it originates from the name O'Heyens
O-H-E-Y-E-N-S
And that origin is Irish, it's an Irish name
I always knew my name would essentially be based of a slave name
But yes, it's an Irish name, meaning servant
So, essentially, not only is my last name a name originated from slave trade
But it literally means a servant
So, I mean, it's a weird thing to have to carry around
I'm proud of my name, I'm proud of my dad, I'm proud of my family
But it's very strange to have to carry that every day
We all carry that. All, every black person carries that

It's strange, I've been thinking about this a lot
Essentially, almost what this album is, is myself
I feel like I'm deconstructing myself, trying to work out who I am
So I'm not this painted image of who I was
I think in my past I was almost rejecting
An image of myself that wasn't even mine
What I mean by that is, there's this um
There's this James Baldwin interview where he is discussing, when he was writing Native Son
How he was growing up rejecting this image that was painted of him
He never had eaten watermelon before, he never really listened to jazz before
You know all these things that the white man has painted of the black person, the person's culture
Now that's not to say those things don't have richness in them
That you can celebrate, that we did create
So we're here to essentially go back, deconstruct all of that
And learn to speak for the first time
I feel like I'm learning to speak again, in my late twenties
I mean that's, it's a strange thing, I mean
Putting something out into the world, anything out into the world -
That doesn't just mean art - yourself, out there -
It's strange to add to all of this knowing that
Your voice essentially may not matter in the grand scheme of things
That's actually, that's kind of wrong y'know, we have to keep putting our voice out there
Because someone somewhere is going to hear it: we do exist
So we have to keep deconstructing our past, reevaluating, and learn to speak
It's all we can do. And, I'm proud of it. I'm going to reclaim it
And, hopefully, we'll move on longer, through other people. The same name. The same thing goes for every other slave name. We have to reclaim, refocus
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