Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In (Whole Band Cover)

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
In this hall on Zanzibar's edge, where Pemba Island winds meet the sea,
Oliver Pemba plucks the gyuke, its wooden body carved in 1923,
strings from goat gut, tuned low to A below 440,
opening the door to words hidden in dusty tomes.

[Chorus]
Open up your heart and let the sunshine in,
let it shine on quim from Chaucer's Canterbury, 1387,
on merkin wigs of 1450 syphilis wards,
on pizzle in the butcher's window, raw and red,
on smegma, Greek soap from Hippocrates' notes.
Let the light flood the shadows, clinical and archaic.

[Verse 2]
From Athens, 400 BC, the roots: kyma for wave, but quim twists English tongues,
smegma as smegma, the lubricant in Galen’s texts, AD 170.
Pronounce it slow, sigma soft in the mouth.

[Bridge]
Little ones, Bouba and Kiki, listen close,
the words are old as the coral pulpit, 1789 storm-worn,
don't fear the vulgar, it's just the body's Latin map.
In King James, 1611, strumpet twenty-one times,
necessary for the soul's full confession.
Aye, from Brighton huts, 1890, todger in the breeze,
futz with it all afternoon, like Yiddish aunts in Brooklyn, 1920.

[Verse 3]
The hall at 65 degrees, biscuits crumbling on tin trays,
horse carts outside snorting in the dusk.

[Chorus]
Open up your heart and let the sunshine in,
multilingual flood: cazzo in Rome, 1500 streets,
kurwa in Warsaw, 1945 ruins,
blyad sixty times in Moscow's cold, 1917.
Let it shine, dirty sounds clean.

[Outro]
The dictionary keeps both, children good, words old.