You Can Be Who?

(album: Christ - The Album - 1982)

Don't want a life of lies and pretence
Don't want to play at attack and defense
Just want my own life. I want to be free
So you can be you, and I can be me.

Respectable businessman smart and secure
Eat the fat of the land that they robbed from the poor
The butcher is smiling as he brings down the knife
As he cuts up the meat, he thinks of the wife
As eminent psychiatrists suffer paranoid fits
The ones they call mad have to pick up the bits
The preachers speaks calmly, says it's love that we lack
While his imaginary dagger is held at our back

Don't want a life of lies and pretence
Don't want to play at attack and defense
Just want my own life. I want to be free
So you can be you, and I can be me.

In bed you're the master or mistress, who cares?
Abusing each other as your work off your fears
Go climb a mountain, go fuck a scout
Avoidance of self is what it's about
Pretence and illusion to avoid who you are
Don't work on yourself, just polish the car
Switch on the telly afraid you might find
That as well as a body you've also a mind
Cheap glossy surface to cover the lie
Cheap easy answers to the what, where and why
Media drivel, yet you still watch the screen
Life ain't for real, it's a magazine
Conned from the start but hang onto the lies
You're a slave to the cathode ray paradise
You don't want the world, you just want the pics
Media junkies, you'd die for a fix

Don't want a life of lies and pretence
Don't want to play at attack and defense
Just want my own life. I want to be free
So you can be you, and I can be me.

So you say you'll regret it, well that's maybe a start
But it's so fucking easy to act out a part
Say you'll reject it, but still toe the line
Conning yourself that you're doing just fine
Anarchy, freedom, more games to play?
Fight war, not wars? Well it's something to say
Slogans and badges worn without thought
Instant identities so cheaply bought
Well freedom ain't product, it just isn't fun
You're looking for peace your work's just begun
Fighting oppression, aggression and hate
Fighting warmongers before it's too late
We've got to fight back to show that we care
For so many years we've been silenced by fear
Our lives have been ruined by liars and fools
The powerful and greedy who bind us with rules
Politicians and preachers who bind us with laws
Stolen our peace and given us wars
They've used us as means to their own violent ends
Turned us against each other, made foes out of friends
They've distorted, perverted, polluted our lives
They've brainwashed the world with their sordid beliefs
They seek to possess, control and corrupt
If it's freedom we're after, they've got to be stopped.