Inside Story - Live

Is it okay if we take it back a few years?

I wanna know how many people in the house tonight

Have a record that we made called Inside Story

Listen in to these words from a citizen of Earth's surface

Let's try and rewire the circuits, determine the purpose

Meanwhile I'm striving for perfect, only perfect takes practice

And I find in these days and times I'm always so damn distracted

They hit you like, "Shop here, wear this, want this

Love this, be this, buy this, buy that

Log in, sign up, tune in, click here

Watch this, read up, write back"

So much to know, so many things to own

TV in your home and your mobile phone

Make sure that you're never really alone

And it's pathetic, like a global epidemic

Attention span so fragmented, addicted to being connected

We now gettin' updates by the second

Got us all time wastin' up on MySpace and Facebook

Prime for the takin', got the whole world hooked

Gettin' high on information

Generation Y babies, they call us the digital natives

Hide behind their monitors as technology kills imagination

My cynicism, a world where every kid's best friend is a computer

Is a system failure headed for an apathetic future?

Just a few centuries back they made

Maps of a flat world by candlelight

Now the whole world's at your fingertips

Mapped right down to your street by satellite

So advanced from where we started, it's all so complexified

Brand names buy ad space in your mind

But they'll never get what's inside

I wasn't there when they wrote the rules

But I do my best to follow them

In this world of machines

We starvin' for oxygen

All I can offer is these words that I write

And I only give 'em what I know

So I give 'em what's inside, say

Said I wasn't there when they wrote the rules

But I do my best to follow them

In this world of machines

We starvin' for oxygen

Where were you the day that humanity died?

Searching for signs of life to reconnect with what's inside

Somewhere there's a room full of men in suits

Looking up at rows of numbers

Terrified by the red in their eyes as arrows point down

From the pressure they're under

See, we might drown in our own greediness

Living beyond our means

Chasing dreams that we learnt off MTV Cribs

Look at what we did

Smoke fills the sky and the cars line up at the servo

And I can't help but think to myself

This can't be the way it was supposed to go

On the nightly news, floods and bushfires

Earthquakes and tidal waves

Temperatures rise and armies fight

And bombs go off and silence babes

Just tryna get by, occupy our spot on the timeline

So we change the channel to sex, drugs and violence

Programmed for prime time

Sit back in our chairs, living room voyeurism

As reality TV turns all of life into a competition

Airbrushed magazine pages give us false idols to worship

Got us all so depressed that we can't live up to picture perfect and

Sometimes I wanna unplug and go back to basics

And I wonder what my story might've been like

Somewhere else in history's pages, but

Here we stand, the sons and daughters of colonialism

Crossed over water just to be making our homes on stolen land

And me, I don't know the plan, I'm just here to play my part

Do my thing, walk my path, talk my shit, make my mark

I swear I wanna make a difference from the bottom of my heart

I don't know how to fix it, man, I wouldn't know where to start

So advanced from where we started, images off the production line

We outta touch with what's inside now

We outta touch with what's inside now

I wasn't there when they wrote the rules

But I do my best to follow them

In this world of machines

We starvin' for oxygen

All I can offer is these words that I write

And I only give 'em what I know

So I give 'em what's inside, say

Said I wasn't there when they wrote the rules

But I do my best to follow them

In this world of machines

We starvin' for oxygen

Where were you the day that humanity died?

Searching for signs of life to reconnect with what's inside

It's like something just over the horizon

Wanna take a walk? Maybe see what we can find?

Look long and hard, look near and far

But above all things remember always look inside