Bienvenue [English translation]

Beyoncé

IAM

Welcome, welcome

Welcome to where the strong kill the weak, where hunger kills for sure

Where society congratulates you, and accepts you once you’re rich

Where debts accumulate, where credit corners you, a bunch of hotbeds

Where men, for want of ideals, swear by the hookers perverted in videos

Every night it’s a party, posh rooms attract booty

On the top dogs, who sprinkle the coffee tables with pure cocaine

Here, kids dream of being Pirès, many leave and few stay

Many are those that by 13 know what it’s like to get drunk for the first time

Welcome to where the air is polluted, by backfiring exhaust pipes

Allergies like a domino effect, and record levels of ozone (O3) in the lungs

Pains in the hip, nothing’s more dangerous than the human beast

When they explode a Brink’s van painlessly with TNT (trinitrotoluene)

Known vices irritate the State machinery, cabinets change

Leave the shit in state, few pass the metal handcuffs, we’ve got it here

Here 300 armoured vehicles do what they want, as if they lived alone

Bringing everything back to their tiny throats

When a thousand die, mowed down in the crosshairs

Welcome, after September 11 we evoke another path

Of silence: say goodbye,

The fucker from another time, shouts fuck the world

Where old men from rich countries fantasize about the girls from Bangkok

Why set apart these bastards in brothels

Here we believe less in God and more in ghosts, a bloody hymn

We burst into song, everywhere you feel the fear of a people passed commercial colours

Winter eats summer, and spring sometimes kills autumn

Cry louder, the great of this world, have lost their hearing aids

Welcome, my little angels

Cause here is the world

[Refrain:]

Welcome to a place

Where people lie to your face just to get it done.

Welcome to the human race

If you ain't got money, you'll pay with pain

Welcome to this world of ours

If you had the chance would you come back again ?

'Cause now you're here, ain't no turning back,

You got tears in your eyes

Monkey on your back

We all have a purpose in this world

We have to believe that we belong

Can't forget where we came from

We came from love.

Welcome to this thing between hell and paradise as much one as the other

Here, angel and demon argue the yard for the stakes those that wallow on the ground

Where we only worry about the horror when it knocks on our doors

Where rumours kill slyly, vicious stab of a dagger in the aorta.

Where you eat shit and they only tell you 20 years later.

Cause in fact, they don’t give a fuck what you think

We know it, but they never say it.

Where we’re too stupid to see that a brother is good long before he dies

Then we praise ourselves for knowing him, buying his pictures visiting his crib

Welcome to this world where we say we’re all equal, a joke apart from that

The gutter up there is the offices but the best are in the area

Where we think we’re so fragile that we make plans for spare parts

Here we have little time to buy ourselves legs in the family on Sundays

Where nobody eats for hunger, site of conflict without end

To create in the end so that alone one meets their ends

Misery as a means where the supposed dead slave

Is rife again all over the place

You see! There’s always specks of vain dust

that take themselves for gods

Welcome, not to Gattaca, but almost where only the elected evade the press

We corral the rest waiting for old age to manifest,

Where we talk about pre-selection, improvement, transformation

Of genes, isn’t it magnificent, an armada of super soldiers of lead

Where they'll kill you for a steak or a buck

Where you hear the blind lie

We don’t see the illusion, wool’s over our eyes

I’m telling you the obscure, because the clear,

I'd rather you discover it

Go on kid! Get started, you’re all worried about getting a move on it! I’ll cover you.

[Refrain:]

Welcome to a place

Where people lie to your face just to get it done.

Welcome to the human race

If you ain't got money, you'll pay with pain

Welcome to this world of ours

If you had the chance would you come back again?

'Cause now you're here, ain't no turning back,

You got tears in your eyes

Monkey on your back

Welcome to this world, welcome to this world

Welcome to this world, welcome to this world

Welcome to this world, welcome to this world

Welcome to this world, welcome to this world