Sydney Opera House 40 Year Celebrations

Interestingly; I was reading about the 40 year anniversary of the Sydney Opera House on the ABC News website today, only to learn that the first concert ever held there was actually by a political artist. The unofficial concert, held on 9 November 1960, saw Paul Robeson sing songs by Joe Hill for the construction workers in their lunch break. Arranged by the building union, the audience presented him with a hard hat with his name on it after his performance. Below is the YouTube footage of the concert:



Further Reading
ABC News, Timeline: 40 years of the Sydney Opera House (20 October 2013) < http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-20/40-years-of-the-sydney-opera-house/5025816 >  at 20 October 2013

Amnesty International Ambassador for Conscience Award 2013: Harry Belafonte

Fantastic news recently that Harry Belafonte has been awarded the Amnesty International Ambassador for Conscience Award this year. A well known political song writer and activist, Harry was acknowledged for his contribution to overcoming injustice and furthering peace efforts through song. Bono writes on the U2 blog:

"Harry Belafonte, who has  dedicated his life to humanitarian causes, spanning the civil rights movement to the plight of children caught in Syria's armed conflict, was presented with his Award by Roger Waters. He said, 'Since its birth, I have been devoted to the principles for which Amnesty International stands. It is an honour to receive the recognition being bestowed. Amnesty International's stand on any universal abuse to human rights has been courageous and is our moral compass."

It is excellent to see Harry Belafonte being recognised for this talent and dedication. Details of his activism and career can be found here: Harry has been heavily involved in civil rights, humanitarian and political activism. He was also opposed to President George W Bush. 

Further Reading
Amnesty International,  Amnesty International Announces 2013 Ambassador of Conscience Awards; Malala Yousafzai and Harry Belafonte Are Named Recipients (16 September 2012) <http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/press-releases/amnesty-international-announces-2013-ambassador-of-conscience-awards-malala-yousafzai-and-harry-bela> at 19 September 2013
 
U2, Malala Yousafzai, Harry Belafonte: Ambassadors of Conscience (17 September 2013) <http://www.u2.com/news/title/malala-yousafzai-ambassador-of-conscience> at 19 September 2013
  
Wikipedia, Harry Belafonte (7 September 2013) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_belafonte> at 19 September 2013

Blue King Brown: Rize Up

Blue King Brown have a new song out Friday 5th July 2013 called Rize Up. Its a very smooth reggae song with some great lyrics and a cool film clip. When interviewed on TheMusic.com.au Natalie Pa’apa’a said about the song and its lyrics: “As a global community we are beginning to grasp the gravity of our own power to change the world we live in, to carve justice into the building blocks of society and to RIZE UP and take back control of our collective future. Another world is not only possible, it's coming.... #RIZE UP!"


Further Reading
TheMusic.com.au, PREMIERE: Watch The Video For The New Blue King Brown Reggae Jam (2 July 2013) < http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2013/07/02/premiere-watch-the-video-for-the-new-blue-king-brown-reggae-jam/ > 2 July 2013

News Exchange: Protests in Istanbul

Just wanted to let you know the ABC Show News Exchange makes a brief reference to some music being played in Istanbul at the recent protests, take a look here. It starts at 9 minutes and 50 seconds. Described as 'the most peaceful moments of the protest.' One of the songs played was by John Lennon, with pianist Davide Martello stating he 'hoped he could change the minds of the conservative politicians.' According to The New York Times, footage of the songs being played was shared over the internet, around the world.


Further Reading
The New York Times, Music in Istanbul Is Intermission for a Protest (15 June 2013) > at 19 June 2013

ABC2, News Exchange (14 June 2013) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-14/news-exchange-friday-14-june/4755974

One: Agit8

I play political music on air at River FM in Lismore every Monday from 3-4pm. I find it difficult at times to locate music I want to play. I was pleased to see the new One: Agitate website to day, that provides music, images and lyrics of some popular protest songs. It is really worth a look - here. Categories include Anti Apartheid, Anti War, Civil Rights, Anti Poverty, Women's Rights and Other songs. One's Agit8 is also available on facebook.

Further Information
One, Agit8 <http://www.one.org/protestsongs/?source=fbw0612>

Yunupingu

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Yunupingu today. He was the leader sing of the Indigenous Australian band Yothu Yindi. Their most famous song, Treaty, called on the Australian Government to formalise land ownership and rights in this country. Sadly that is still yet to be done. Here is the YouTube clip of Treaty - Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders are warned that this may contain images of the deceased. One love people.

Bono on Activism - Charlie Rose Interview

I havent had a chance to watch this yet but it looks absolutely fascinating:

Serious Comedy: Tripod

Dan Bull: We Are All Aaron Swartz

Great song from Dan Bull about Aaron Schwartz:

Artsfex

I was just reading a press release on Freemuse from October this year about a new organisation called artsfex.org - they write:

Today 14 international arts and human rights organisations and networks – representing more than 1,200 national organisations globally – launched Artsfex, the first international civil society network actively concerned with the right of artists to freedom of expression as well as with issues relating to human rights and freedoms generally. Artsfex aims to promote, protect and defend artistic freedom of expression, as well as freedom of assembly, thought, and opinion in and across all art disciplines, globally.. Recent censorship incidents, the suppression of creative voices, and threats against the lives of artists have made it clear that we have arrived at the moment when creative workers and free speech activists need to work together against repression and for an open cultural space both locally, regionally and globally.”

The organisations involved are:

• Arterial Network
• ECA – European Council of Artists
• ECSA – European Composer and Songwriter Alliance
• FERA – FEDERATION OF European Film directors
• FIA – The International Federation of Actors
• freeDimensional
• Freemuse – The World Forum on Music & Censorship   
• ICAF – International Committee for Artists’ Freedom
• IETM – International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts
• IFCCD – International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity
• Index on Censorship  
• PEN International    
• NCAC – National Coalition Against Censorship, USA

They passed the following resolution at the Copenhagen Summit on Artistic Freedom of Expression:

There is an urgent necessity to launch an international initiative to protect and promote freedom of artistic and creative expression (in the visual arts, music, dance, film, writers, theatre etc.) with the goal of increasing awareness about violations of freedom of expression in the arts among artists and the arts sector, in the media, among political bodies, human rights and free speech organizations, as well as among the general public.

This initiative will:

• serve as an  information exchange
• monitor and analyse censorship in the arts worldwide with the goal of identifying trends and creating an understanding of the various mechanisms of censorship and persecution of artists for their creative work
• publicly expose the persecution and censorship of artists
• advocate in support of artistic and creative freedom worldwide
• hold governments accountable to their obligations under the relevant international conventions and national laws
• direct artists in distress to existing information, funding and other resources for emergency and ongoing support  and facilitate their relationship with  relevant funders and defenders of human rights

A vision paper has also been drafted which details the organisation's vision, aims and activities and is available on its website.
 
Further Information 
Arstfex: http://artsfex.org/

Bob Dylan - Death Of Emmett Till

The folk tradition of borrowing from others....

Q&A: Protest Singers in Australia

Just caught up on last nights Q & A which is on ABC TV1 in Australia on Monday nights. Two of the panelists were Billy Bragg and Peter Garrett (former lead singer of Midnight Oil and current Minister for Education). At 11:38 seconds into the show Michelle Slater from Macclesfield, VIC asked via video:

There appears to be a lack of young political singer-song writers in the Australian music scene. Music, especially folk music, is the voice of the people and provides an avenue for dissent. While we can name current musos like John Butler providing that voice, where are the young Gen Y protest singers? And why aren't they out there?

Here's some of the answer/discussion:

PETER GARRETT: Well, I think they probably are. I'm not sure that Michelle's had a chance to catch up with them. Earth Boy, The Herd. I mean I can think of people who writing songs now and I don’t get as much of a chance to listen...

TONY JONES: So hip-hop is where it's at these days, is that what you're saying?

PETER GARRETT: No, hip-hop and is a great, powerful, musical verbal form and quite a lot of hip-hop has got a political edge to it, both local and overseas. And I mean, you know, you can go to listen to somebody who's busking and you will hear them, they might be playing a Billy Bragg song. They might be putting a point of view about a particular issue. So I'm not sure that it’s not there. They may not be on the charts. You may not be able to easily access through mainstream media but I think, if you go looking, you'll find them.

TONY JONES: Billy Bragg?

BILLY BRAGG: Well, I think something has changed undoubtedly. When I was 19 years old and wanted to make my voice heard, I really only had one medium open to me. Working class background, we're talking in the late 1970s. Really the only choice I had if I wanted to speak to my peers, if I wanted to speak to my parent's generation, was to pick up a guitar, learn to play, do gigs and make records. Now, if you have an opinion, you have the internet, you have the opportunity to blog, you can make a short film about something you feel passionate about, put it on YouTube. You go and Facebook...

BILLY BRAGG: The point is that everybody now can engage in the debate and I think that’s very positive and I do think young people are engaging in the debate but it's tough to learn to play guitar. Not everybody can stand up and sing in front of an audience so I can understand why people put, you know, their time into the social media. But let me tell you this: nobody ever wrote a tweet that could make you cry. Nobody ever toured Australia reading out their Facebook comments. If you want to see the world - if you want to see the world and get paid for it learn an instrument, get out there, step up, let's hear your voices. There’s always going to be and audience for (indistinct)...

JULIA BAIRD: I think it would be great if you had a Q&A competition and had someone play at the end that had the best song. I think it's an indictment on us that we don't actually know enough, as Peter is saying and maybe it's kind of a niche music thing. Maybe we're not spending enough time listening to Triple J but, yeah, when I was listening to Billy's album during the week and the great album you did with Wilco about Woody Guthrie and I spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to have that kind of music during the dust bowl and a time of great dispossession and it went on to the time of the Great Depression and there was someone saying you have a dignity and this is your land and you have because it's your land you have the right to ask policy makers that it be recognised as your land and at that time, of course, a lot of people in the banking industry had made a lot of risks with other people's money. And people were grappling with it. So I think it's hugely important...

AMANDA VANSTONE: Music in the civil rights movement over that time in the United States was very, very powerful. In fact I think even the ABC might have done a documentary on this matter and I watched - whoever made it, I don't know - but it's a very interesting piece of work showing the role that music played in getting in touch with what people really felt and sharing that message...

BILLY BRAGG: And that’s the crucial thing. I mean the real definition of success in the music industry or in any industry really is if you can do the thing you always wanted to do and get paid to do. Everything else is cherry on the cake. The hardest leap you ever make as a musician is where you give up that job you really can't stand and you finally manage to start to make a living. If you can do that, if you can achieve that, and that is becoming harder because of the change in the music industry because of recording music, the bottom's dropped out of recorded music. The industry helping young artists to make that leap is difficult. It's not so difficult for older-ites like myself and Peter, who have got a large audience back home but young artists are finding it tough. Fortunately though the live music scene is thriving because we have it's a bit of a cliché but it is true. You can experience a download but you can't download an experience. Going to a gig and having that wonderful experience of being in an audience.

PETER GARRETT: Nothing will ever beat, I don't think, being in front of people, whether you're in the audience or on stage. But just to go back to that earlier question, I think there is some really powerful political music that Australian musicians have created over time. I think a lot of it has been driven by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musician and other musicians who have been sympathetic and identified with the kind of issues that are important for them. If you listen to any person making music from an Aboriginal community, you're going to hear songs about land, you’re going to hear songs about country and I think there's many acts, too many to mention. They're not well known necessarily. I mean some like Yothu Yindi are quite well known.

TONY JONES: Well, Archie Roach will be on this program next week.

PETER GARRETT: And Archie Roach. Fantastic, yeah. So I think it's there but we haven't had a folk tradition that's become mainstream that's reflected, say, things like the Depression, what we went through during the war periods or economic hardship and we probably haven't had hardship generally as a country on the sort of scale that perhaps they had during the period of the dust bowl when (indistinct)...

JULIA BAIRD: You know, a lot of people in Australia listened to Bruce Springsteen. It wasn't really until I went to a series of his concerts in the States and, you know, in New Jersey...

JULIA BAIRD: But, no, I got it when I went to the giant stadium where he’d done his first ever gig and it was going to be knocked down the next day. It was his last concert there and it was the middle of the recession. Young, old, people of kind of all kinds of descriptions, crying, hugging each other, jumping up and down whatever he sang. You know, Jersey Girls and so on and that defiance, that: bring on your wrecking ball. And he was a man who is still singing about the Iraq war, he’s still singing Woody Guthrie songs and I got how resonant that was and I think we import some of that music without, you know, necessarily understanding a lot of that context.


More Information
ABC, Folk Music, Five Years & Funding (22 October 2012) < http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3610729.htm >  at 23 October 2012

Luke Vassella - The word is out

Here is another anti coal seam gas mining song from Luke Vassella, a local to Northern NSW and a regular performer at CSG rallys that have been happening lately in the region. I wrote about the issue back in June this year. I've been playing him a lot on my radio show - you can find all his CSG songs on my Music With A message blog here, hope you like this one:

NPR: The Composer of 'Strange Fruit'

Check out this great article/podcast on the composer of the Billie Holiday song 'Strange Fruit' from NPR. A very interesting man with an interesting background.

NPR, The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit' (6 September 2012) < http://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/158933012/the-strange-story-of-the-man-behind-strange-fruit > at 12 September 2012

Audio: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=158933012&m=160588917  at 12 September 2012

Spotify blog embeded button

Just trying out the Spotify embeded button for blogs... one of my favourite songs from Blue King Brown - Say Peace.

Pussy Riot: guilty

As you may have heard Pussy Riot were found guilty of hooliganism in the trial against them in Russia this week  - see my earlier post on this here. Today I found this note on facebook from Billy Bragg and thought to share it with you:

Free Pussy Riot!

The trial of the members of Pussy Riot in Russia has been reported on recently in Australian news. For those that are unaware of the case, three Russian women Maria Alekhina (24), Nadezhda Tolokonikova (23) and Ekaterina Samucevich (29) formed an anonymous feminist performance art group in October 2011. The group sought to draw attention to "the values and principles of gender equality, democracy and freedom of expression contained in the Russian constitution and other international instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the CEDAW Convention."

They were arrested and charged with hooliganism - a charge that carries a prison term of 7 years imprisonment - after they performed and filmed a 1 minute piece highlighting the association between President Putin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and uploaded it to YouTube. They have now been in jail for 10 months with the matter yet to be heard. There is a website set up to document the trial here. 

On the 20th July at Moscow's Khamovinchesky District Court an application for the women's release was rejected and they were ordered to stay in jail pending an appeal. Their lawyer has asked to summon Mr Putin as a witness.

This is a very interesting example of political musicians being persecuted for freedom of speech and well worth reading about. In addition to the website you can also check out a recent article from Freemuse here. 

Further Reading
Free Pussy Riot < http://freepussyriot.org/ > at 2 August 2012


Freemuse, Freemuse calls for free and fair trial for Pussy Riot (30 July 2012) < http://www.freemuse.org/sw48226.asp > at 2 August 2012

Wayne Swan on Springsteen and political music

Just read an interesting article from the (Australian) ABC News site - here - on Acting Prime Minister/Treasurer Wayne Swan's musical preferences. The article states that Swannie has a particular interest in the music of Bruce Springsteen - he states:


"It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics... If you listen to the albums that came out after Born to Run - albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, Born in the USA and Nebraska - you can hear Springsteen singing about the shifting foundations of the US economy which the economists took much longer to detect, and which of course everyone is talking about now."

Take a quick look at the article if you can because it highlights the connection between music and politics very well - its only short. Swannie also lists Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and the Hilltop Hoods as being inspirational - who'd of thunk it? A tresurer that likes the Hilltop Hoods - ace man!

Further Reading 
ABC News, Swan enlists Springsteen to bash the bosses (1 August 2012) < http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-01/wayne-swan-channels-springsteen-in-attack-on-miners/4168174 > at 1 August 2012

 

Coal Seam Gas

A big environmental movement has been growing over the past 12 months or so in my local area with local residents very concerned about Coal Seam Gas Mining and the limited power to stop gas companies from entering onto people's land and drilling for gas. On the weekend I participated in a rally and presentation to the local Mayor of declarations from the residents on each of the streets in our village stating that the residents are refusing to allow gas companies to mine on their properties.

It is very interesting to see this movement grow both in real space and on the internet. Facebook pages are being used to communicate with and coordinate concerned citizens, youtube/vimeo are being used to disseminate audio and video footage, concerts are being organised to support the cause, CDs are being released, movies are being made and there is even a musical being written and performed by local artists (Coal Seam Gas the Musical).

Here are a couple of clips that highlight the issue - the first is from the Dunoon Celebrations on the weekend when an adaptation of Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land was sung (I have a white coat and pink scarf on and am standing on the left). The second clip is a song from a local artist called Luke Vassella (he has a few songs on this topic now) - I am going to play this song and a few of his others on air next week on my radio show (I have already played a whole hour of song on Coal Seam Gas on my radio show earlier in the year). The third (Vimeo) clip is a trailer for a new film about the music that was performed at a rally in Lismore - the film, due to be released soon, is called Rock The Gate (Lock the Gate is the name of the campaign currently underway in the Northern Rivers).

It is both fascinating and wonderful to see the power of protest, art and the internet combined together - enjoy:

Fifty in Five - New Film Clip

Check out the newly released film clip for Fifty in Five by the Hilltop Hoods: