Category: Music

Rebel Without a Pause—Lupe Fiasco

Lupe Fiasco rocks a Palestinian flag and an Occupy Wall Street t-shirt during his performance at the BET Hip-Hop Awards. (via Mondoweiss).

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NPR Music with special guest Manu Chao

The following is an NPR Music radio interview with Manu Chao.

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/altlat/2011/09/20110907_altlat_fullshow.mp3?dl=1

For the Asad Nation

The Strong Heroes of Moscow parody the lies of Syrian state media and the thuggishness of pro-regime propagandists. I found this version, with English subtitles, at Jadaliyya.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The great Gil Scott-Heron is no more. He was a poet, revolutionary and a fighter. He fought against apartheid in South Africa and he fought against Apartheid in occupied Palestine. He was also a prophet who foresaw in 1968 something which rings just as true today. Rest in peace brother.

P.s. Don’t know if this is any good but here is a lengthy profile from the August 2010 issue of the New Yorker.

Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial Feminisms

By Huma Dar

A woman in niqab being arrested in Paris, April 12, 2011, copyright EPA

Of Civilities and Dignities

On 22 June 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, asserted that burqas (or the burqa-clad?) are “not welcome” in France, adding that “[i]n our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and that “the veils reduced dignity.” France’s Muslim minority is Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, estimated at six-million-strong.  And this is just an approximation, as the French Republic implicitly claims to be post-race and post-religion via a prohibition on any census that would take into account the race or religion of its citizens. (This anxiety mirrors the brouhaha in Indian media àpropos the much-contested enumeration of OBCs or Other Backward Castes in the Indian census surveys of 2011, or the urgency to declare some spaces post-caste, post-feminist, and post-racist while casteism, patriarchy and racism continue unabated.)

Continue reading “Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial Feminisms”

My Journey to BDS

by Roger Waters

In 1980, a song I wrote, “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,” was banned by the government of South Africa because it was being used by Black South African children to advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so-to-speak, on certain songs, including mine.

Twenty-five years later, in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival used the song to protest Israel’s apartheid wall.  They sang “We don’t need no occupation! We don’t need no racist wall!”  At the time, I hadn’t seen first-hand what they were singing about.

A year later in 2006, I contracted to perform in Tel Aviv.

Palestinians from the movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me to reconsider.  I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was unsure whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go. The Palestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit the occupied Palestinian territory, to see the Wall for myself before I made up my mind.  I agreed.

Continue reading “My Journey to BDS”

The Macy Gray Effect

A few weeks ago, while I was in al-Araqib after the 11th ethnic cleansing attempt (yesterday was the 15th), I was interviewed by the Israeli Channel 10 culture editor, about Vanessa Paradis’ cancellation of her performance in Israel. Only one of the sentences I uttered in the 15-minute interview was included in the segment, and the rest is somewhere on the Channel 10 editing floor. So in an act of preservation, I’d like to paraphrase a part of the interview:

Channel 10 culture editor: “OK, so Vanessa Paradis canceled, do you really think anybody cares?”

Myself: “You came all the way to al-Araqib to ask me that, I think it’s pretty effective.”

Continue reading “The Macy Gray Effect”