Oliver: Katch 22 - Cynical World (21 December 1991)

This was one of my mixtape recommendations after reviewing the album, Diary of a Blackman Living in the Land of the Lost.  Many of Cynical World's concerns reflect those found within the album.  White hypocrisy ("You call me mate, but you hate what I stand for"); black inertia ("The black race.  We're so forgiving"); the limits that society places on black people, forcing them to become like sheep and which Hunt Killbury FiNN and co exhort them to fight against ("They arrest the body, but they can't detain your brain") and the abiding fear that it will be the black man in this society who gets the shit end of the wedge, every time ("They've got the handle and I've got the blade"). It all plays out over a horn refrain which Katch 22 never credited on the record, but which sounds like a ghoulish lift from a 50s U.S. Police TV series, just to top off the cynical, hard bitten world that Katch 22 suffer in and encourage us to confound, every day.

Video courtesy of LordInfamousYattaro.