In keeping with our recent discussions on the power of song, it’s worth checking out Foreign Policy‘s recent piece “Rapping the Revolution.” It talks briefly about the history of rap in North Africa and its role during the Arab Spring:

There is nothing new about Arab hip-hop. Scholars point to its nexus in Moroccan youth political dissent manifested in the vibrant cultural movement known as Nayda, which means “get up on your feet,” or “wake up” in Darija, the Arab dialect spoken in the Maghreb. Dissident rappers like H-Kayne and Donn Bigg, who called on Moroccans back in 2007 to “quit fear,” captured youth while rhyming about ubiquitous corruption and misery in Moroccan suburbs. Next-door in Algeria, famous (and banned) rapper Rabah started rapping during the civil war in 1994 with his group Le Micro Brise le Silence (LBS), “The Microphone Breaks the Silence.” Palestine’s Da Arab MCs (DAM) has produced a stream of powerfully political rap since their 1998 debut.

[...]

But there is no denying the outpour of creative, intensely politicized hip-hop that has accompanied the Arab uprisings. In Egypt, Adel Eissa, known as “A-Rush” from Cairo’s group “Arabian Knightz,” recorded a song on the night of January 27 called “Rebel,” which he quickly released on Facebook and MediaFire. Mohamed El-Deeb, known as MC Deeb, dropped a track ‘Masrah Deeb’ on February 3 in the heat of the Tahrir uprisings. #Jan25, a song spearheaded by titans of the genre Syrian-American Omar Offendum (Omar Chakaki) and Iraqi-Canadian The Narcicyst (Yassin Alsalman) generated hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. Over in Libya, Milad Faraway, a 20-year-old Libyan who created the rap group Music Masters with another young friend in 2010 tells Qaddafi to leave in “Youth of the Revolution;” in a track titled “17 February” by the group “Revolution Beat” (formerly called “Street Beat,” though their songs — due to fear of punishment — never did hit the streets) tells Qaddafi the fear barrier is broken.

“Arab rap is finally on the map,” says Amor. “And we’re blowing up the world.”

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How should music rank among the ever-growing list of time-tested nonviolent methods such as boycotts, marches, strikes, sit-ins, and vigils?

Anthony Shadid of the New York Times reports that a song, “Come on Bashar, Leave,” is spreading across Syria, boldly calling on President Bashar al-Assad to step down. (Bryan Farrell also wrote about it at Waging Nonviolence yesterday.) The article suggests that a young cement layer who chanted it in demonstrations was pulled from the Orontes River this month, his throat having been cut, and, according to residents of the city of Hama, his vocal chords torn out. Hama is where, in 1982, then-president Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president named in the song, gave orders to the army to massacre more than 10,000 in putting down an Islamist upheaval. Today, boys aged six years and older vocalize their own rendition of the original warbler’s song instead. As the song has sped across Syria, demonstrators have adopted it for themselves.

During the U.S. civil rights movement, “freedom songs” raised courage, stated the goals, declared commitment, united separated communities, and sometimes took melodic aim at notorious police chiefs. As a contemporary expression of spirituals, freedom songs derived from the black choral tradition that developed from the African and American experiences, matured in the fires of southern slavery. They addressed frustrations, forged bonds of personal loyalty, assuaged fear and dread, and fortified a people under stress. A strong tradition of composing during performance, in response to need, meant that new phrases would be added or a stanza changed to take up a specific issue, such as deciding whether to go to jail the next day. Song leading became an organizing tool. The civil rights struggle was profoundly rich in song, due to the significance of black congregational singing, nourished as it was by faith and resistance. The movement’s signature anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” has since become a universal expression of civil resistance movements across the world.

Later, music held a central role in the nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc. On August 23, 1989, hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians linked hands in a human chain across 400 miles, “manually” connecting the capital cities of the three Baltic republics. As many as 2 million participants of all ages demanded the right to restore their independent statehood, as they sang folk and nationalist songs. They called their action the Baltic Way. Estonia’s struggle that brought independence is specifically known as the Singing Revolution.

During Ukraine’s quest for fair elections in 2004–2005, songs sung by rock groups contributed to the Orange Revolution movement. In 17 days in autumn 2004, massive rallies gained staying power from the efforts of musicians who performed around the clock. As approximately 1 million disciplined Ukrainian demonstrators camped out in Kiev’s Independence Square to protest rigged election results, their singing and music expressed their purpose. Everyone could participate, and music helped to assure the security personnel that the throng would be stationary. Music ranged from Okean Elzy, the most popular group in Ukraine, to the rock band Grandzioly (Green Jolly), which recorded the official lyrics of the Orange Revolution, “We Are Many, We Cannot Be Defeated.” In Ukraine alone, the song had 1.5 million downloads.

Why is music and song important in civil resistance? Several reasons leap to mind. Read the rest of this article »

The New York Times yesterday reported on the origins of Syria’s protest anthem, “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar,” or “Come on Bashar, Leave.” While there’s certainly no confusion over the song’s blunt lyrics and direct message, little is known about the person who created it. As reporter Anthony Shadid points out, however, there is near consensus on one point:

A young cement layer who sang it in protests was dragged from the Orontes River this month with his throat cut and, according to residents, his vocal cords ripped out. Since his death, boys as young as 6 have offered their rendition in his place. Rippling through the virtual communities that the Internet and revolt have inspired, the song has spread to other cities in Syria, where protesters chant it as their own.

[...]

The man pulled from the river was named Ibrahim Qashoush, and he was from the neighborhood of Hadir. He was relatively unknown before July 4, when his body was found, then buried in the city’s Safa cemetery, near the highway.

Video on YouTube, impossible to verify, shows a man purported to be Mr. Qashoush with his head lolling from a deep gash in his throat. Residents say security forces shot him, too. But people in Hama dwelled on the detail that stands as a metaphor for the essence of decades of dictatorship: That the simple act of speaking is subversive. “They really cut out his vocal cords!” exclaimed a 30-year-old pharmacist in Hama who gave his name as Wael. “Is there a greater symbol of the power of the word?”

In a rebellion whose leaders remain largely nameless and faceless, Mr. Qashoush has become somewhat celebrated in death. “The nightingale of the revolution,” one activist called him.

This has become the legend at least. There are some discrepancies as to whether the real singer was someone else with the same name. Others insist that the song was actually written by a 23-year-old part-time electrician and student named Abdel-Rahman, also known as Rahmani, who the Times managed to find.

Sitting in a basement room, Rahmani celebrated what he called “days of creativity.”

As the protests in Hama grew bolder and bigger last month, he said crowds grew bored with the old chants — “Peaceful, peaceful, Christians and Muslims,” “There is no fear after today” and “God, Syria, freedom, and nothing else.” Speeches were not much better. Activists soon managed to bring sound equipment, powered by generators tucked in the trunk of a car, he said, and he wrote his first song, “Syria Wants Freedom.”

“Come on Bashar, Leave,” followed, though he and his brother Mohammed argued for a week over whether he should keep a marginally derogatory line, “Hey Bashar, to hell with you.” It stayed, and now draws the biggest applause, cheers and laughter.

“What I say, everyone feels in their hearts, but can’t find words to express,” he said, dragging on a cigarette. “We were brought up afraid to even talk about politics.”

No matter the song’s originator, the true origins of the song seem to be years of pent up political angst. Such lyrics as “Hey Bashar, to hell with you” may seem juvenile to us, but they are exhilarating to the people of Syria who no longer have fear to speak their mind. Even the slightly negative tone of the song hasn’t prevented it from reaching and affecting people more in the middle or even on the regime’s side.

“It’s started to spread all over the country,” said a former Republican Guard officer who has joined the protests in Homs, an hour or so from Hama. “It keeps getting more popular.”

Shadid sums it up best when he says:

Tunisia can claim the slogan of the Arab revolts: “The people want to topple the regime.” Egyptians made famous street poetry that reflected their incomparable wit. “Come on Bashar, Leave,” is Syria’s contribution to the pop culture of sedition, the raw street humor that mingles with the furor of revolt and the ferocity of crackdown.

Calvin Trillin and John Lewis in 1961.

Everyone knows that memory, and its penchant for myth-making, obscures a lot of the dirtier shades of truth. Especially when, say, a social movement has been successful. There’s so much heroism on hand that retelling those stories takes up all the time one might otherwise devote to more dead-end details. Hence the curiousness of Calvin Trillin’s essay on the Freedom Rides in the current issue of The New Yorker, “Back on the Bus” (subscription required)—it dwells, mainly, in the dead-end. Curious, too, is the fact that the heroism isn’t really lost in these kinds of details; they’re there nonetheless, even if more by implication.

This, I think, is a lesson for those of us trying to meet the challenge of doing good writing about social movements. You don’t have to be a propagandist, believe it or not. Better not to be. You don’t have to ignore the wrinkles. The truth comes through.

Exactly 50 years ago now, Trillin was jetting around the South covering the civil rights movement—though not exclusively that, as he points out—for Time, which processed and rewrote his dispatches up in New York. He remembers the uncanny things he learned then, such as how to evaluate the degree of a person’s racism by how the word “Negro” was pronounced, and all the verses of “We Shall Overcome.” But he also remembers quite a bit of what we normally like to forget—for instance, the fragmentation and competition among the civil-rights movement’s various factions:

[T]he most cynical view of the Freedom Ride was that it was an attempt by [Congress of Racial Equality leader James] Farmer to gain some standing for CORE in the South, where they were jockeying for influence among the N.A.A.C.P. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And he remembers the movement’s various modes of unpopularity—we remember the violent suppression, and so forth, but less the apathy and sense of futility:

[A]t a time when the Nashville sit-in movement had pretty much completed the desegregation of the city, … fifty-seven percent of Americans believed the sit-ins and other demonstrations would hurt rather than help the chances of Negroes being integrated in the South.

And he remembers the moral ambiguity, the people caught in the middle:

I … watched … a Greek-immigrant diner owner with tears in his eyes telling black sit-in students in Atlanta that, as much as he sympathized with their cause, serving them would mean the end of his business.

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As U2 took to the stage at the Glastonbury festival last Friday, activists with Art Uncut – an offshoot of UK Uncut – inflated a 9ft-wide, 20ft-high balloon that carried the message: “U Pay Tax 2.”

Despite having permission from the festival’s organizers for the creative protest, security used excessive force, including breaking a finger of one of the activists involved, as they quickly brought down the balloon.

Nevertheless, the protest was widely covered in the mainstream media, with images of the action appearing on the BBC and many national newspapers. In the Guardian, Art Uncut founder and co-organizer Philip Goff explained the purpose of their protest:

The narrower point was to raise concerns about the irresponsible way U2 arrange their tax affairs. In 2006 U2 Ltd moved most of its tax affairs to Holland, seemingly in response to the Irish government’s decision to cap the tax-free exemption on royalties at €225,000 (before this, artists in Ireland were not obliged to pay any tax on royalties). Our concern is that when individuals and corporations “shop around” different countries for the best tax deal, this puts pressure on governments all round the world to lower their tax rates, which results in an ever-dwindling proportion of profits going to governments to spend on schools, hospitals and public services. Given the financial difficulties in the group’s native country right now, any tax revenue denied to Ireland hurts badly.

The broader point of the protest was to raise awareness of the connection between tax ethics and development. Christian Aid estimates that $160bn, more than the global aid budget, is lost every year to the developing world from multinational tax dodging. It’s clear that if we’re serious about making developing countries richer, we need individuals and corporations to take a much more ethical and responsible approach to their tax affairs.

Art Uncut aims to bring about a culture shift, to create a world where people automatically and instinctively think about tax ethically. We’re not claiming that individuals have a duty to pay as much tax as possible. Rather each of us has a duty to think about tax in an ethical context, to ask questions such as: what’s my fair share? What do I owe to the country that paid for my healthcare and education? What’s the spirit as well as the letter of the law? What effect does how I arrange my tax affairs have on the globe?

[...]

Second, we want to encourage consumers to make tax one consideration in their choice of which artists to support, or which companies to buy from; just as environmental considerations already figure in these decisions. We want to see a world in five years’ time when credible musicians just don’t do what U2 Ltd did, because they know the public won’t support it.

Existence Is Resistance, “an internationalist organization determined to promote non-violent resistance through cultural arts,” is about to release a film about their work bringing hip-hop artists from around the world to occupied Palestine: Hip Hop Is Bigger than the Occupation. See the trailer above. From the press release:

Existence is Resistance & Nana Dankwa present: Hip Hop Is Bigger Than The Occupation, a documentary about a ten day journey of artists traveling through Palestine, teaching and performing Non Violent Resistance through the arts.

The tour included M1 of Dead Prez, Shadia Mansour, Marcel Cartier, Mazzi of Soul Purpose, DJ Vega Benetton, Lowkey, Jody McIntyre and Trinidad, Brandon and Lavie from the South West Youth Collaborative/University of Hip Hop Chicago.

Staying in the heart of Balata Refugee Camp @ the Yafa Cultural Center in Nablus the group witnesses night raids, toured places like Hebron where there are roads for the Arabs and roads for the Jews, they meet families of shaheeds as well as young Palestinians who have been jailed, shot, humiliated, the group visits Bi’lin where they get shot at and tear gassed and experience first hand what it felt like living under occupation.

If you’d like to see more of the film, and you’re around New York, there’s going to be a world premiere screening at the excellent Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn, on Monday, May 30th at 6:30 pm. Details here. I’m sure that for those not in New York other opportunities will arise.

To get a sense for the kind of messages they’re putting out there, take a look at this video by LowKey, an English-Iraqi rapper and activist who appears in the film. The second verse makes a clear pitch for the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement, to the point of listing particular companies whose products should be avoided.

I just got a note from the incomparable Reverend Billy, the performance artist, activist, and post-theistic preacher, with news about his latest project, now running on Sunday nights at Theatre 80 in New York City:

Our experiment, “The Church of Earthalujah!”—is a playful but pretty basically new approach to environmentalism. Like our usual play—this iteration may be a political rally for the earth, or a post-theistic religion designed for hipsters, or a improvisational comedy show. And if it isn’t all three—we’re having a bad night…

We’re saying that we need a kind of faith to drive stronger analysis and direct action—for the crisis of the Earth’s physical systems. Prayers and rousing gospel, polemics like sermons and liturgy and the altar call—it’s a step beyond traditional environmentalism in 2011, which has fallen into a stupor since Copenhagen.

He’s definitely right about the stupor. And with the big climate meeting coming up this December in Durban, once again, there’s need to build a stronger, more creative, and more effective global movement than ever before to support real change. If you’re in town, you can start by catching Billy’s show!

"Cops like calendar photo"

The saga of our special correspondent Quince Mountain’s stay in the occupied Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, continues from yesterday. Today he remained inside; protesters who tried to leave even just for a breath of fresh air were not allowed back in. Authorities are clearly intending to make the protesters will leave, but they have yet to take forceful action to make them do so. Receiving his text messages over the course of the day was surreal as I worked at my computer, and rode my bike into Manhattan, and went to a dental appointment where CNN was reporting that Charlie Sheen is demanding a multi-million dollar raise. Needless to say, I was glad that at least someone was paying attention while history is being made.

Here’s a sampling of Quince’s dispatches over the course of the day.

9:17 am

There is a confrontation? Not clear. A guy in the center is yelling about tension. People are asking cops yelling why aren’t people allowed in?

Use of the word fascist. And peace.

These teachers union guys on the bottom are running a certain part of the show.

But I don’t feel a lot of confidence in a revolution this morning.

Coffee might help.

Now they’re singing “we love u” to the police.

9:45

Guy from fox business network clear to say he’s not fox news network. “we’re straight”

10:01

My friend just texted asking if I’m willing to get arrested.

“Why?” I wrote.

Oh. And now he wrote “jail is awesome for trans folks”. I suppose, huh?

[On what happened last night:] I walked in at this key moment where ppl were almost leaving but didn’t. Just chose not to. And last night so many ppl I talked to attributed that to who got on the mic when. Like these five ppl basically just worked the crowd and were like “we didn’t need to leave”. Like ending exactly when the main push to eject ppl happened. And they just stayed.

10:39

So it’s like… A standoff? 25 cops with dogs at every door and only letting anyone in for each person who goes out?

11:30

[While in the bathroom, he hears a noise.]

Is that a saw or grinder? Or some ocd senators beefcake electric toothbrush?

Oh. the grinder was to grind off the screw heads [to keep people from breaking in with screwdrivers]. They did a nice job. I’d give it a B.

11:50

Hymns.

Or at least hallelus.

12:37 pm

Tmrw at 4 pm the gov reveals probably nasty budget.

So ppl are trying to stay in bldg. Gov trying to “threaten and bully the senators”

People don’t even want to let the gov in the building. Though I’m sure he’ll get in.

Read the rest of this article »

• Around 15 people staged a sit-in at an RBS-owned insurance company in Glasgow to protest bankers’ bonuses.

• A swarm of between 50 and 100 AFL-CIO union workers crashed the Mortgage Bankers Association summit on the future of mortgage servicing in Washington, DC on Wednesday to protest the government’s bailout of the financial system.

• The US Airline Pilots Association picketed at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Tuesday to bring attention to what it sees as US Airways’ deliberate efforts to drag out contract negotiations and keep concessionary labor contracts in place long past their intended duration.

• Almost 500 backers of the college radio station KUSF poured into the University of San Francisco’s Presentation Theater on Tuesday to protest university President Stephen A. Privett’s decision to sell the station’s frequency and shift to an online-only format.

• About 150 people opposing “fracking” in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale deposits demonstrated at incoming Governor Tom Corbett’s inauguration ceremony on Tuesday, unfurling a banner which stated their position: “Stop the Drilling.”

• Eight protestors were arrested after angry workers staged a sit-in at a downtown Minneapolis Chipotle restaurant yesterday morning over the firing of hundreds of undocumented workers.

• Tunisian police today fired shots in the air to disperse hundreds of protesters demanding that ministers associated with the rule of ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali quit the government.

Icelandic pop star Bjork led a three-day karaoke marathon that began last Thursday as part of a protest against the takeover of an energy firm that would effectively sell-off one of the country’s main natural resources. According to AFP, Bjork was joined by “the captain of the Icelandic handball team, a 70-year-old environmental campaigner and… the comedian-turned-mayor of Iceland’s capital Reykjavik.”

It’s not yet clear if the karaoke-fest will have an effect on the sale of the plant, but Bjork did manage to accumulate 20,000 signatures to a petition asking the government to consider revoking the takeover. Not bad for such a strange protest.