Lyrics

They tuned me wrong in alabaster halls,Tried to press lullabies through iron walls.But I was born with metronome bones,My breath tuned to ancestral moans.They crowned me mad, said I can’t be tamed,But child, I never asked for fame.I asked for justice,thick and raw,Not compliments, but change in law.A requiem in every scale,I wasn’t bred to court or pale.No chiffon tongue or velvet stance,I cleaved the keys with a vengeance dance.Born with thunder in my wrist,A preacher’s daughter, raised to twist,The sorrow into black-and-white,Each ivory tooth,a blade, a fight.Not muse. Not myth. Not manic dame,But dissonance dressed in a righteous flame.They wanted ballads sweet with grace,I gave them hymns to haunt the place.I played for love, they played for war,And when they knocked, I barred the door.’Cause peace don’t come to quiet girls,With razored tongues and coiled curls.Each octave bled like rusted chain,My voice,a sermon soaked in rain.I laced my throat with cypress root,And played like truth in a three-piece suit.They called it jazz,I called it gore.A weapon forged on grief’s dance floor. While men in silk dealt guilt in gold,I split the firmament and made truth bold.The North wore suits,the South wore hoods,But both fed on my womanhood.I wasn’t groomed for chandelier rooms,But backroom blues and marching tombs. Mississippi wasn’t a place,it was pulse.It beat behind each phrase I wrenched convulse. They said,”She’s wild,”I said,“You’re numb.”I played with fingers turned to drum.Don’t gift me flowers,give me rage.Don’t just say my name,unbar my cage.Don’t quote my pain, then vote to bind,I bled in full,not just in kind.I drank exile like red wine’s ghost,Learned silence wails when needed most.I spoke in thorns,in ash,in brass,With no permission,no backstage pass.No label carved the storm I stirred,I sang what saints refused to word. Each pause,a burial.Each swell,a spell.Each breath,a bell that wouldn’t quell.So speak of me not in silken tone,But like a storm your gods disown.Say,She was gall.She was requite.She licked the wounds and set them alight.I was not pretty,I was prism.Not entertainment,I was schism.Not legend,but ledger. Add up the silence, line by line,Then ask who muffled what was mine.call me prophet,witch,or dame,Just know the songs I never played,And when this world forgets the tune,My rage will rise beneath the moon.History will say I bent each note like a jazz trombone and Queens don’t whisper.just Ask Nina Simone.