TALWST - Do You See My Skin Through the Flames? lyrics

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? [TALWST] 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 sh**ty 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 [Dev Hynes] 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 [?]