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Bottleneck (feat. Sean Ross)

from The Rap Guide to Wilderness by Baba Brinkman

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lyrics

We’re diminished
We’re down to just a couple souls
We’ll be finished
When this bottleneck is closed
When there’s no one left alive
But my siblings, oh no
Seeds need to be
Seeds need to be
Seeds need to be sown

Every creature alive is a leaf on a family tree
And every species is a branch on a limb that goes back to pre-
Cambrian, primordial seas, and branches die and we grieve
‘Cause evolution will never reproduce a design that’s unique
In 1936 a tasmanian tiger passed
The last leaf alive on a giant outlying branch
And yeah, extinction happens, it’s indigenous in the wild
Typical natural selection with its indifferent style
But lately we’ve increased the rate by several thousand fold
From the stellar’s sea cow to Irish elk to golden toad
And I’m told the Clovis people killed off the megafauna
Ten thousand years ago, so it’s not a strictly modern problem
It started with some narrow hits with spear tips
A human with a pair of sticks and arrowheads is perilous
On the Siberian steppes, the mammoth and wooly rhino
Died to feed some hunters in the pleistocene, that’s fully final
And today the Western black rhino is nonexistent
It was driven to extinction by quack medicinal tinctures
Keratin doesn’t cure cancer or give you an erection
That’s death by superstition. On the island of Mauritius
Evolution produced a monstrous overgrown pigeon
Both flightless and delicious – our two branches connected
And less than eighty years later the dodo was fried chicken
I just wish I could’ve seen one of those lil’ guys livin’

We’re diminished
We’re down to just a couple of souls
We’ll be finished
When this bottleneck is closed
When there’s no one left alive
But my siblings, oh no
Seeds need to be
Seeds need to be
Seeds need to be sown

It’s 2014, and our actions are digitized
Online, Wikipedia keeps track as extinctions rise
In 1914, the last passenger pigeon died
In 1865 they still blackened the evening skies
No one thought it would happen to such an abundant species
A broken branch can’t evolve again after it’s deceased
Unless… unless we can learn to read
A creature’s DNA and see its T–A’s and G–C’s
We have specimens, as fantastical as it seems
The resurrection of Lazarus lies in passenger pigeon genes
Sequence them and stick them in eggs like Jurassic Park
And rekindle the flame on that dead branch with a spark
It's an audacious path to embark on, it sounds crazy and high tech
But it’s been done before in the Pyrenean ibex
A cloned extinct mammal survived for seven minutes
And scientific advances are still vying to test the limits
And once we’ve mastered those and have the clones to pass them on
Maybe the Siberian steppe will be home to mastodons
Again, and Tasmanian tigers can return and turn obnoxious
And become the Hobart version of London’s urban foxes
And this apocalypse of biodiversity loss will be reversed
It’s not an alternative scheme to the re-wilding of earth
It’s a complimentary strand on the path to restoration
Environmentalism combined with scientific exploration

We’re diminished
We’re down to just a couple of souls
We’ll be finished
When this bottleneck is closed
When there’s no one left alive
But my siblings, oh no
Seeds need to be
Seeds need to be sown

credits

from The Rap Guide to Wilderness, released December 16, 2014
Written by D. Brinkman, D. Moross, and S. Ross
Chorus by Sean Ross
Rap by Baba Brinkman
Produced by Soulful Spider
Additional Production and Mix by Lin Gardiner
Keys by Simon Kendall

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Baba Brinkman New York, New York

Science rapper and inventor of several novel hip-hop variants. Canadian transplant to New York. Pathological optimist.

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