For 10 days in Paris I was a helpless prisoner of my past: four years of undistinguished high school French and one semester at college.
She seems to be the helpless prisoner of two nationalities in an image that departs from the often positive take on Chicano identity that predominated in the earlier show.
One of the pleasures of sampling is that you, the artist, get to make anyone from Charles Manson to the President of the United States a helpless prisoner of your song, forced to sing along.
When he rapped, "People be talking, I feed dolphins/My defense'll fly the coop off your mean office," he sounded somehow helpless, held prisoner by the pleasures of language.
It describes a "scourge of sexual violence", with "appalling abuses and acts of sexual perversion are perpetrated on helpless and unprotected prisoners".
Its datedness is amplified by the central situation: the helpless and humiliated prisoners being harangued by a malicious, self-justifying chain-gang boss.
"I am old and suffering from a heart ailment; I am left helpless, so please release four Taliban prisoners," he said.
She said in 1984: "I'm not defending prisoners because I think they're poor helpless beings who have been maltreated by an evil society.
It is an enemy that takes hostages but never takes prisoners, an enemy that congratulates itself on murdering the helpless, as the sickening, videotaped executions of Daniel Pearl and, this week, Nicholas Berg demonstrate all too vividly.
