Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Occupy Wall St. Hip Hop Anthem
Posted by onehundredflowers on October 11, 2011
Posted in hip hop, music, occupy wall street, Occupy Wall Street, occupywallstreet, organizing, politics, video | 2 Comments »
Needed for revolution: The galvanizing shock of a musical pulse
Posted by Mike E on September 4, 2011
This first appeared on Counterpunch.
In some ways, this appeal feels old and somewhat patronizing.
And yet its point is true enough: Where is the searing music of this time? We are waiting. We are listening. We want it now.
Got some candidates? Share them. Got the will? Make some tunes.
Joe Strummer is Spinning in His Grave
Why Music Needs to Get Political Again
How ironic that The Clash should be on the cover of the NME in the week that London was burning, that their faces should be staring out from the shelves as newsagents were ransacked and robbed by looters intent on anarchy in the UK. Touching too, that the picture should be from very early in their career – Joe with curly blond hair – for The Clash were formed in the wake of a London riot: the disturbances that broke out at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival of 1976.
At the time, the press reported it as the mindless violence of black youth intent on causing trouble; now we look back and recognise that it was the stirrings of what became our multicultural society – the moment when the first generation of black Britons declared that these streets belonged to them too.
The Notting Hill Riots of 35 years ago created a genuine ‘What The Fuck?’ moment – the first in Britain since the violent clashes between mods and rockers in the early 60s. While west London burned, the rest of society recoiled in terror at the anger they saw manifested on the streets of England. In the aftermath, severe jail sentences were handed down and police patrols stepped up in areas where there was a large immigrant population. Sound familiar?
But something else happened too – in the months that followed, bands appeared that sought to make sense of what went down on that hot August night. Aswad, Steel Pulse and Misty in Roots were among the reggae bands that stepped forward to speak for the black community.
Posted in music, punk | Leave a Comment »
Stirring performance in Nepal: Bring the storm!
Posted by kasama on September 1, 2011
Defiant. photo: Eric Ribellarsi
She sang:
“We cannot surrender.
We cannot become traitors.
We cannot kill our own dreams.
We cannot give our arms to the enemy.
We cannot betray the revolution.”
This first appeared on the Winter Has Its End site for revolutionary journalism.
by Liam Wright
I lifted my eyes as I wiped a streak of sweat from my face. The place was packed. About a thousand people crammed into a theater meant to hold nine hundred. The center aisle was filled with people perched on impromptu seats all the way to the back row. Some stood peering through the entryway. Up top, the balcony was filled to the brim as well. And… it was hot.
We had traveled overnight out of the mountains, on an eleven hour bus ride to get to Butwal, a small city in the sweltering lowland Terai region of Nepal. This city is an historic spot. It is the place where the renowned Nepalese warriors, known as Gorkhas, defeated the British East India Company in 1816, maintaining Nepalese independence.
It seems only appropriate that we would come here, a place where Nepal had fought so decisively for sovereignty long ago, to see a performance organized by a section of the Maoist’s who want to fight to continue their revolution now. The performance, Samana or Resistance, we were told was, “both a call to the people and a warning to our leaders.”
The whole way over I was excited. I’d been mulling over this for a bit. How would the Nepalese revolutionaries go forward? How would they settle the debate over whether to dissolve their People’s Liberation Army or not? Would they move to break through? To go for power? Or would those among the Maoists party’s leadership who want to consolidate a capitalist democracy win the day?
This program promised to give us a hint of how the revolutionaries among the Maoists planned to tell the people: “We’re going to move. Be ready.” We were told that the program is going on tour through forty-five places in all, each with a couple showings. If each is overflowing like this, they were going to reach a lot of people.
Posted in art, comedy, communism, dance, Liam Wright, Maoism, music, Nepal, Prachanda, revolution, UCP Nepal (Maoist), winter has its end blog | 1 Comment »
The George Jackson Tribute Mixtape
Posted by onehundredflowers on August 20, 2011
This was originally on I Mix What I Like!
The George Jackson Tribute Mixtape
We’ll start our Black August celebration a little early this year by re-posting our 2006 George Jackson FreeMix Radio Mixtape. This mixtape features DC-area artists and activists reading portions of Jackson’s work and a bunch of good music from folks like Public Enemy, Dead Prez, Blitz, Hasan Salaam, Asheru, Head-Roc, Black United Front, Wise Intelligent, Immortal Technique, Mos Def, Lil’ Wayne, RZA, Ghostface Killah, and many more. We also borrowed of few minutes from the classic Freedom Archives audio documentary Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica and Black Liberation and a Bay Area television documentary Day of the Gun.
Listen and download here: The George Jackson Tribute Mixtape
Posted in >> analysis of news, African American, anti-racist action, Black History, Black Panthers, George Jackson, music, police, political prisoners, prison | Leave a Comment »
Review: White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
Posted by onehundredflowers on August 19, 2011
This was originally written for drownedinsound.com.
“After all, the single biggest achievement of punk is that it was the first musical movement to try to place men and women on an even footing, which few movements before and since have done; look at the players in the UK between ’76 and ’81, or NYC’s No Wave (corresponding to UK post-punk). If, as this book argues, punk’s attitude, poses, and costumes (highlighting socio-economic bondage) are things that can be taken off by white people, but not by black, then we have to doubt the sincerity of the former, but the whole point of a DIY and/or youth movement is that it doesn’t ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ but offers a vision, and a design for living, while it can.”
Stephen Duncombe
White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
by Alexander Tudor
The central problem of punk is this: music that’s simple (to play, to record, to distribute, to imitate) lends itself to the expression of radical politics – challenging racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, and so on – just as much as it lends itself to less deserving causes (say: embodying all of the above). Like ‘the black CNN’ (as Chuck D later called hip-hop) punk reported from the ground before anyone else… but sometimes you couldn’t tell the Rock Against Racism crowd from the skinheads. It’s a problem worth disentangling, and anyone acquainted with punk history knows that Britain’s own punk explosion coincided with the arrival of cultural studies, or its blossoming into something lucid, readable, and (as much as it ever could be) productive; as in, likely to feed into the more sophisticated manifestoes, and recognize actual political engagement.
Posted in >> analysis of news, music, punk, racism | Tagged: Stephen Duncombe, White Riot | 3 Comments »
Amy Winehouse, Addiction and Mythmaking
Posted by onehundredflowers on July 25, 2011
This was in guardian.co.uk.
Thousands like Winehouse die every year, and they are not venerated, or even pitied. We will not educate ourselves about the disease, or reform drug laws that plunge addicts into a shadow-world of criminality and dependence on criminals. Winehouse got away with too much said one copper, after a tape of her using was released. Did she? Did she really? Winehouse walked barefoot through the streets because that is where the drugs were, and even as her bewildered face splatters across the front pages, drug support charities are closing, expendable in this era of thrift.
Amy Winehouse: Why is there so little understanding of addiction?
Tanya Gold
Amy Winehouse is dead and any useful understanding of the mental illness that killed her seems far away. Already the portrait is painted and flat-packed, smelted and ready to become myth.
There is tiny Amy with the swaying beehive hair and the frightened eyes, tormented by her talent and the chaos it brought, famous at 21, dead at 27, now a member of the repulsively named “27 Club” of musicians who were also addicts and died at 27 – Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. All dead, all revered, as if it was their illness that made them interesting. The initial, rushed obituaries made much of Winehouse “making it” into the 27 Club. Would she make it to 28 and be shut out? No, she got in, with 54 days to spare.
Posted in music | Tagged: addiction, amy winehouse | 10 Comments »
“Fuck You” In Sign Language
Posted by onehundredflowers on July 22, 2011
H/T to Dennis O’Neil
a
Happy Friday!
Posted in music, video | Tagged: Cee-Lo Green, Fuck you, sign language | 1 Comment »
Se Abrirán las Grandes Alamedas: On Nueva Canción and Revolution in Latin America
Posted by onehundredflowers on July 10, 2011
Album cover for ¡Karaxú!'s 1974 album, "Chants de la Resistance Populaire Chilienne" (Songs of the Chilean People's Resistance)
This is the first episode of a new series by Kasama Project member Selucha, with the purpose of sharing Latin American revolutionary culture through presentation and analysis of the nueva canción (new song) tradition. Each week he will be sharing a particular song with us, along with a brief essay outlining and describing the context (country of origin, political situation, etc.), lyrics, musical elements, and musicians. Additionally, each episode will include song lyrics in the original Spanish and in translated English. Selucha runs a Tumblr blog called Se Abrirán las Grandes Alamedas, and previous episodes of this series from his site can be found here.
SONG OF THE DAY: ¡KARAXÚ! – YA NO SOMOS NOSOTROS [CHILE, 1974]
“What the hell!? The minute I say that I feel like being free,
they exchange my clothing for that of a prisoner.”
THE ARTIST AND THE CONTEXT
Today, we’re going to take a look at the Chilean nueva canción tradition and listen to a song by ¡Karaxú! (ka-ra-HU), a group that was formed in exile in 1974, a year after the 1973 coup d’etat that overthrew President Salvador Allende by famed singer-songwriter Patricio Manns. Manns, active since the mid-1960s, has been a prolific creator and ambassador of Chilean culture, not only through music but also as a novelist, poet, playwright, and journalist. Upon forming ¡Karaxú!, he put together an early lineup which included singer Mariana Montalvo, Franklin Troncoso, Bruno Fléty, Negro Salué, and Negro Larraín, though only Troncoso and the native-French Fléty remained until the group’s dissolution in 1990. It’s name is said to come from the Spanish word carajo which colloquially translates to damn it but, in context, comes from the works of Ecuadorean poet César Dávila Andrade and refers to a “shout of courage and rebellion.”
Posted in >> analysis of news, Chile, Latin America, music, Selucha | Tagged: ¡Karaxú!, Nueva Cancion, Patricio Manns, Salvador Allende | 9 Comments »
Gil Scott-Heron “Message to the Messengers”
Posted by onehundredflowers on June 2, 2011
Lyrics:
Posted in African American, Gil Scott Heron, jazz, music, video | Leave a Comment »
Gil Scott-Heron “Guerilla”
Posted by onehundredflowers on June 1, 2011
Posted in African American, Gil Scott Heron, jazz, music, video | Leave a Comment »
Gil Scott-Heron “Whitey On The Moon”
Posted by onehundredflowers on May 31, 2011
As we know, Gil Scott-Heron passed away last Friday. In honor of his contributions as a revolutionary artist, we’ll be posting videos of his s0ngs over the next few days.
Lyrics:
Posted in African American, Gil Scott Heron, jazz, music, poem, racism, video | 1 Comment »
Gil Scott-Heron, A People’s Artist, 1949-2011
Posted by onehundredflowers on May 28, 2011
This was first posted on guardian.co.uk.
We were very sad to hear the news that Gil Scott-Heron had died.
His recording career spanned 40 years. Influenced by Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone among others, he combined spoken word, blues, jazz with revolutionary politics to create a musical expression that would inspire future generations.
“You can go into the beat poets and [Allen] Ginsberg and [Bob] Dylan,” Chuck D from Public Enemy said, “but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern world.”
Gil Scott-Heron dies aged 62
by David Sharrock
The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron – best known for his pioneering rap The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – has died at the age of 62, having fallen ill after a European trip.
Jamie Byng, his UK publisher, announced the news via Twitter: “Just heard the very sad news that my dear friend and one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, the great Gil Scott-Heron, died today.”
Scott-Heron’s spoken word recordings helped shape the emerging hip-hop culture. Generations of rappers cite his work as an influence.
Posted in >> analysis of news, Black History, Gil Scott Heron, hip hop, jazz, music, poem, video | Tagged: Gil Scott-Heron | 15 Comments »
Stic Man: Corazon Remix
Posted by Mike E on May 24, 2011
Stic Man (of Dead Prez) created this Corazon Remix. Thanks to Dan DiMaggio for the suggestion.
Posted in African American, anti-racist action, capitalism, immigrants, music, video | Leave a Comment »
Asa: Jailer (Attica/Arizona Mix)
Posted by Harry Sims on May 16, 2011
Posted in music, subculture | 2 Comments »
Stalin wasn’t stallin’ (some mixes)
Posted by Mike E on May 4, 2011
Posted in >> analysis of news, music, video | 5 Comments »
Video: Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma
Posted by onehundredflowers on May 4, 2011
H/T to Jessica:
Posted in dance, music, video | Tagged: Lil Buck, Yo-Yo Ma | 1 Comment »
Video: “Your Country” Gogol Bordello
Posted by onehundredflowers on May 2, 2011
Lyrics:
Posted in music, video | Tagged: Gogol Bordello, Your Country | Leave a Comment »
Ozomatli: Masters of War
Posted by Mike E on April 27, 2011
Members of the band Ozomatli Ulises Bella, Jiro Yamaguchi and Raul Pacheco perform Bob Dylan’s scathing “Masters of War.” It was part of a 2007 reading of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in Pasadena. Thanks to Jimmy Higgins.
Posted in Bob Dylan, music, video | Leave a Comment »
