Written by Allen Ginsberg, performed by Rage Against the Machine
It had to be flashin' like the daily double It had to be playin' on TV It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour It had to be announced over loud speakers
The CIA and the Mafia are in cahoots
It had to be said in old ladies' language It had to be said in American headlines Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents Rich bankers with criminal connections Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a big time syndicate from Tampa, Florida And it had to be said with a big mouth
It had to be moaned over factory foghorns It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts It had to be screamed in the kitchen It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting
It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors It had to be foghorned into New York harbor It had to echo onto hard hats It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms
It had to be written in library books, footnoted It had to be in the headlines of the Times and Le Monde It had to be barked on TV It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors
It had to be played on wire services It had to be bells ringing Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas
It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends, reported Time magazine
It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba, Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines
It had to be dope cops in the Mafia Who sold all their heroin in America
It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together in cahoots against the commies
It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers A world-wide laundry for organized criminal money
It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together They were bigger than Nixon And they were bigger than war
It had to be a large room full of murder It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage A red hot pen A scream in the back of the throat
It had to be a kid that can breathe It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia It had to be organized crime
One big set of gangs working together in cahoots
Hitmen Murderers everywhere
The secret The drunk The brutal The dirty rich
On top of a slag heap of prisons Industrial cancer Plutonium smog Garbage cities
Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment
It had to be the rulers They wanted law and order And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo
They wanted junkies They wanted Attica They wanted Kent State They wanted war in Indochina
It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI
Multinational capitalists Strong armed squads Private detective agencies for the rich And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes
It had to be capitalism The vortex of this rage This competition Man to man
The horses head in a capitalists' bed The Cuban turf It rumbles in hitmen And gang wars across oceans
Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots manned Egyptian fighter planes
Chiles' red democracy Bumped off with White House pots and pans
A warning to Mediterranean governments
The secret police have been embraced for decades
The NKPD and CIA keep each other's secrets The OGBU and DIA never hit their own The KGB and the FBI are one mind
Brute force and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
It had to be rich and it had to be powerful They had to murder in Indonesia 500000 They had to murder in Indochina 2000000 They had to murder in Czechoslovakia They had to murder in Chile They had to murder in Russia