The legacy of musician, filmmaker, and activist Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Andrew Young

Adam Yauch and his daughter Tenzin Losel (Photo courtesy of Polaris)

Adam Yauch, founding member of legendary rap group the Beastie Boys, passed away today at the age of 47. In 2009, Yauch was diagnosed with cancerous tumors in one of his sailvary glands and one of his lymph nodes. Yauch and those close to him expressed optimism for a full recovery throughout his three-year battle with cancer. The shocking news of Yauch’s passing was reported by TMZ and confirmed with a statement on the Beastie Boys’ official website. He is survived by his daughter Tenzin Losel and wife Dechen Wangdu. Yauch and Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horowitz announced the original diagnosis and the need to postpone tour dates in 2009.

One of the dates the group was forced to cancel was a headlining gig at New Jersey’s All Points West festival. Last-minute replacement headliner Jay-Z dedicated his performance to Yauch, and kicked off his set with Beastie Boys classic “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

Yauch’s legacy is one of irreverence, artistic merit, personal growth, and social consciousness. The Beastie Boys catalogue speaks for itself; their first four albums, Licensed to Ill, Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head, and Ill Communication, are considered hip hop classics. The Beasties’ melding of rap, off-the-wall samples, and punk rock created an entirely new sound that influenced countless subsequent artists.

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Plan B Confronts 2011′s UK Riots with “Ill Manors”

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Andrew Young

Ben Drew, aka Plan B

British rapper/actor/director Benjamin Paul Ballance-Drew, better known as Plan B, explores the dark world of income inequality, prejudice, and violence that led to riots across England last year in his new single “Ill Manors.” The track, a comeback of sorts following a successful and well-received, yet uncharacteristic soul album, sees Drew spitting caustic rhymes in the thick of the chaos that captured the world’s attention a year before the Olympic spotlight was set to shine on London, in July 2012. Unsurprisingly, the documentary feel of the song and video have elicited comparisons to arguably the greatest hip hop protest group of all time, Public Enemy.

In the track and video, Drew inserts himself into the marginalized segment of British society that carried out the mayhem. While England continues its struggle to pin down a direct cause for the riots, Drew takes less interest in simple cause and effect. Instead of focusing on specific, immediate motivations for the violence, like the shooting death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the police, “Ill Manors” deals with the larger issues of social stratification and prejudice. The prevalent British slang term “chav,” a pejorative used against the poor, minorities, and “dangerous” youths alike, is a particular object of disdain.

The video, directed by Yann Demange, takes an unflinching, yet viscerally thrilling look at the riots’ violence. While stylized visuals based on such recent catastrophic violence could be considered in bad taste, Drew makes the distinction between glorifying violence, and creating an honest piece of art that reflects reality — brutal or not — in an interesting and authentic way.

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Bonnie Raitt on music with a message

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Will Travers

Bonnie Raitt with Stephen Colbert, April 16, 2012

During an interview on The Colbert Report from April 16, Stephen Colbert starts “taking issue” with Bonnie Raitt for having a history of supporting activist causes. The conversation is brief, but interesting, particularly as Raitt appears to reveal why she doesn’t generally choose to sing protest songs herself. What do you think of her reasoning? Colbert’s line of questioning starts 2:59 into the segment or 15:46 into the full episode.

Stephen Colbert: Now I’ve got a bone to pick with you. You’re one of those activist music types. You’re like a “No Nukes” environmental lady, right?

Bonnie Raitt: Oh yeah, I knew this was coming.

SC: Ok, let me guess. You’re one of those people who says like, “Oh, don’t use any electricity,” and you’ve got like 11 houses, and they all run on baby seal meat. (laughs) Do you walk the walk, baby?

BR: I walk the walk. I’m not perfect, but you know, I try to conserve where I can. I’ve switched the light bulbs out. I drive a hybrid.

SC: Ok well let’s talk about the… (applause) But you don’t sing songs about like conservation, do you?

BR: Mmmm… I think my audience would probably take a hike if I did.

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Next 2 weeks only – FREE protest music!

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Protest Music

Free protest music, from now until April 30!

For the next two weeks, from now until April 30, we’re offering FREE protest music to anyone who follows us on Twitter or becomes a fan on Facebook. This is an exclusive promotion to help us build our audience, courtesy of the band Lokashakti. We’re pleased to be able to offer a free digital download of their debut 3-song EP from 2010, Three Stories — a collection of protest songs about war and its effects upon some of the different groups of people involved. It’s an innovative take on protest music, with each of the songs varying quite a bit in genre. Learn more about the band here: www.lokashaktimusic.org.

So how does this whole thing work? As soon as you click the requisite “Follow” or “Like” buttons on the social networking sites mentioned above, just shoot us a quick message and we’ll reply with a code for the site www.digstation.com. Enter it in the section marked “Redeem Download Cards” and the download should start automatically. You’ll get MP3s of all the songs from the Three Stories EP, including a digital version of the album art you’d have after buying it on CD.

What happens if you’re already a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter? Then you’ve definitely earned a free download — all you have to do is send an email.

So tell your friends!! Especially since Protest Music is brand new, we need to let as many people know about us as we can. And don’t forget, this is only until the end of April — get at us soon!!!

Anti-Flag’s Latest Strike

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Andrew Young

Anti-Flag's new album, The General Strike

The General Strike, the new album from Pittsburgh’s Anti-Flag, sees the veteran punks continue their loud (and fast) brand of dissent, this time with an Occupy Wall Street-inspired message. Released on March 20, The General Strike is the band’s ninth studio album, and its first since 2009′s People or the Gun.

Before releasing the album, the band stopped by the Manhattan encampment to entertain, and show solidarity with, the occupiers. The impromptu performance — the band was in town for dates at NYC’s Irving Plaza — featured a handful of Anti-Flag songs as well as this cover of the Clash’s classic “Shoud I Stay or Should I Go.” More performances can be found over at Punknews.org.

The new album is so informed by the Occupy Movement — from track titles like “The Ranks of the Masses Rising” to the album title and cover art — that it is easy to imagine someone unfamiliar with Anti-Flag’s history viewing the album as an opportunistic misappropriation of the Occupy ethos. Putting a price tag on anything Occupy-related seems completely at odds with the movement’s message and goals.

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Burma’s Clandestine Punk Scene

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Andrew Young

Burmese punk band Rebel Riot (Photo courtesy of Alexander Dluzak)

Burma’s gradual move away from authoritarian military rule and toward a more democratic society is inspiring hope that an end is coming to decades of oppression, including the deadly crackdown on 2007′s nonviolent Saffron Revolution. Humanitarian improvements like the release of noted dissident and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi — who now holds a seat in Parliament — led the United States to begin normalizing relations with the government currently known as Myanmar.

A burgeoning punk scene, unfolding in secret, highlights the fact that though things are improving, people living in Burma believe there is still a long way to go. Germany’s Spiegel Online profiled members of Burma’s punk counterculture, and found that bands like Rebel Riot don’t just write songs about dissent, they rebel every day simply by practicing a condemned lifestyle.

“We young people in Burma have become punks to protest against the political and economic situation in our country,” Rebel Riot lead singer Kyaw Kyaw says. Small government concessions, like releasing a fraction of detained political prisoners, might satisfy foreign states, but the people on the ground are left continuing to fight against repression.

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“La Bala” by Calle 13

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Will Travers

Calle 13's Visitante and Residente (L to R)

Puerto Rican hip hop duo Calle 13, on their 2010 album Entren Los Que Quieran, have created in “La Bala” an articulate, lucid, and critical look at violence in modern-day Latin America. Like a Spanish-language soundtrack complementing the introduction to the movie Lord of War, the song expertly narrates the the trajectory of a bullet, from the explosion inside the firing chamber to the inevitable carnage within its target. By enveloping such trenchant social critique within such a slick package — the music itself echoing Southwest gunslinger anthems of yore — the group is clearly trying to get people to think, all while gaining maximum exposure for their message.

Calle 13, or to the English speaker, ”kai-yay tday-say,” have themselves been involved with numerous causes since their founding in 2005, and have never shied away from addressing politics in their music. One of their very first singles (“Querido FBI”) was written in protest over the US government’s extra-judicial killing of 72-year-old Puerto Rican nationalist and paramilitary leader Filiberto Ojeda Ríos. In no way discouraged by the public’s reception of their having tackled this particularly thorny issue, Calle 13 have been melding their music with social and political messages ever since, taking home 9 Latin Grammys in November 2011 for the album on which “La Bala” appears. That the group has managed to get to this level without significant radio airplay is a bit unprecedented, and also a matter of pride to lyricist and frontman René Pérez Joglar, also known as Residente (pictured at right, above). Hoping to inspire other musicians to buck the trend of writing music about easy topics to sell more records, Pérez advises, “The day you’re on the radio a lot, worry, because you’re doing something wrong.”

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Of taqwacore and Pakistani protest music

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Sonal Shah

Author Michael Mohammad Knight

Muslim protest music has been in the news lately – both in America and in South Asia. Just the other day, the New York Times’ Mark Oppenheimer wrote a column on Michael Mohammad Knight, the “provocateur in a kufi” who imagined into existence the Muslim punk movement called taqwacore (a cross between taqwa, or piety, and hardcore music).

Knight, a convert to Islam, wrote an underground book in the early 2000s called The Taqwacores – a fictionalized account of Muslim hardcore musicians. It received little attention then, but slowly gained a following among young Muslims in America, eventually inspiring a real-life taqwacore movement. A recent documentary about bands like The Kominas helped bring the idea to a larger audience:

While taqwacore bands tend to adopt a general anti-everything stance (The Kominas have been all about Occupy Wall Street in New York, and other bands have voiced support for the Arab Spring), a couple of bands in Pakistan, while less underground in their musical approach, have more focused messages.

In a country where a long tradition of music is threatened by fundamentalists, bands are starting to take a more vocal stand against terrorism, extremism, and violence. Lately, a YouTube video released by a young band, Beygairat Brigade, sparked online chatter about Pakistani protest music. The song, “Aalu Anday,” is a simple ditty that starts off as a complaint about getting “potatoes and eggs” for lunch, but the lyrics deftly move on to complain about corrupt Pakistani politicians, and the valorization of terrorists.

In response to the video, many people have pointed to the more nuanced and more overtly political music and opinions of the band Laal (Red), fronted by Taimur Rahman, an assistant professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Both “Aalu Anday” and Laal’s musically basic but politically fiery “Dehshatgardi Murdabad” (“Death to Terrorism”) have been making the rounds online, along with a blog post documenting Rahman’s anti-American yet anti-extremist stance.

Soundtrack for a Revolution

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Will Travers

The music of the American Civil Rights movement

The 2009 documentary film Soundtrack For A Revolution is easily one of the most inspiring documentaries to have come out on the American Civil Rights movement in recent years. Never in the history of the United States had music been such an integral part of a movement, and after watching this movie one can’t help but wonder whether or not that’s what’s missing today. With the US involved in wars of increasing unpopularity overseas, the American peace movement still hasn’t been able to figure how to involve any significant portion of the US population. Part of the mission at Lokashakti, and virtually all of the focus at Lokashakti Records, is aimed at finding a way this can change. Inspiration toward that end is very easy to take away from this film.

Featuring interviews with people like John Lewis, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, Harry Belafonte, Julian Bond, and James Lawson, you can tell the filmmakers were serious about creating an academically rigorous piece of work. Perhaps the most striking feature about it, however, was how successful they were at narrating the history of the Movement through music. Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the film winds its way through the major battles of the Civil Rights era, including the Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, and finally Selma, Alabama. There we see a modern-day interview with Lynda Lowery, who tells the story of being only 14 years old when she was beaten by Bull Connor’s police during a 1965 march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge.

Juxtaposing modern interpretations of songs from back then with current interviews and original footage from the 50s and 60s very effectively outlined the major influence songs like that had on the Movement. In addition, the inclusion of spirituals like “Wade in the Water” really brought it back to the essence of what was at stake – an unfulfilled promissory note dating back to America’s dark days of slavery.

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“Bone Bomb” by Brian Eno

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Bryan Farrell

Brian Eno, art rock’s resident renaissance man, spoke at the Stop Gaza Massacre protest in London on Saturday. He was mainly repeating what he already wrote in an article for the venerable progressive site Counterpunch.

Eno has touched on Middle East politics in his music as well. He concluded his last solo album (2005’s Another Day on Earth) with a song written from the perspective of a female Palestinian suicide bomber called “Bone Bomb.”

At the time of its release (incidentally, Eno debuted the album in Russia as a challenge to the record industry, which usually releases albums in Western countries first), Eno told the St. Petersburg Times that the song was inspired by two articles he read. One was a news story about a suicide bomber. The other was by an Israeli doctor, who explained that most of the wounds inflicted in a suicide bombing are the result of bone shrapnel from the attacker. Said Eno: “These articles were on the same page, and I thought what a combination of tragedies these represent, so I wrote the song with words from the articles.”

The subject matter may be morbid, but Eno’s intent is clear. He wants his audience to connect with the madness of both the act of suicide bombing and the desperation that leads people to it.

“When you’re in your 50s as I am, what are you going to write about? You’re not going to write about riding in open cars with teenage girls.”
- Brian Eno

Reprinted with permission from All We Are Saying…