Monthly Archives: October, 2011

OCT 25, 2011 - Rapper Jasiri X wrote a great activist song called "Occupy (We the 99)" and put together a video showing that he supports the Occupy movement. Some of the lines from the song are:

"And nobody got more welfare than Wall Street/Hundreds of billions after operatin' falsely/and nobody went to prison/that's where you lost me/but my home, my job and my life is what it cost me."

OCT 25, 2011 - Pink Martini, the activist music "orchestra" of musicians that are deeply involved and active with the local Portland, Oregon political and activist music scene will be putting on a free concert to show solidarity with the Occupy Portland activists.

Pink Martini is described on their website as "Drawing inspiration from music from all over the world – crossing genres of classical, jazz and old-fashioned pop – and hoping to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike, he founded the “little orchestra” Pink Martini in 1994 to provide more beautiful and inclusive musical soundtracks for political fundraisers for progressive causes such as civil rights, affordable housing, the environment, libraries, public broadcasting, education and parks."

The concert will be called "This Land is Your Land", at Pioneer Courthouse Square 12 noon to 1:30 on Friday, October 28, "with the purpose of providing a thinking person’s guide to the Occupy Wall Street / Occupy Portland movements." There will also be speeches from Occupy Portland activists, and Pink Martini says, "‘This Land is Our Land’ rally will be a fun and festive gathering which articulates support for Occupy Portland / Occupy Portland and inspires people to get involved in a peaceful movement for social and economic justice."

Check out the Pink Martini website here.

OCT 25, 2011 - The Quietus has a great new interview out of the musical activist Billy Bragg, and he talks Occupy, resistance and more, calling for the Occupy movement to go beyond the Internet and Facebook. He also talks about the leadership issue and urges young people to not get mired down in old political rhetoric. Here is a small excerpt below.

The Qietus - Protest and Occupation: Billy Bragg Interviewed on the Future of the Left - Kevin E.G. Perry - Oct 25, 2011

Billy Bragg: "What I can't do, despite having been asked by some people, is go down there with my guitar and become Che Guevara. My role is to try and reflect what's going on. Write about it. Old geezers like me, with our perspective, hopefully we can help to inform. Connect it with what happened in the Thirties, with Woody Guthrie, stuff like that, but they don't need me there. They're doing fine. They need me to help spread the word, through the internet and through writing songs. That's my role, and it's important that songwriters remember that. Some of the young bands say to me, when I ask them why they don't talk about this sort of thing in interviews: 'Oh, I don't know enough about politics.' How the fucking hell do you think I learned about it? I left school when I was 16! I didn't know shit about socialism until the miners' strike, but you know enough to write the songs."

"Who gives a fuck whether they're listening or not? You don't care whether people are going to read this, do you? You've gotta do it, who gives a fuck? So that impulse had to be channelled, for most people really, down that avenue. Now things have changed quite a bit. There are other ways to communicate, but I just don't think that getting a load of Facebook 'likes' is the same as getting a spontaneous reaction from an audience who are moved by something that you've sung about or put out there. You're not only making a statement, you're also creating a sense of community around that moment. That's what I think young people are missing when they think that by having a presence on the internet they're communicating. The Occupy movement knows that it goes beyond that. They understand that the internet is just a tool by which you spread the word about what you're doing. Music can do that too, but because it involves performance it has the ability to generate momentum."

"My role, and I've been trying to do this with Occupy Wall Street and the stuff I've been writing on my blog in the last couple of weeks, is to encourage them not to embrace the simplicities of Marxism. There's an opportunity to create a new and passionate political idea that is not tainted by totalitarianism, that doesn't have the shadow of the gulag over it. It's your job to do that!"

Read the whole interview on The Quietus here.

OCT 24, 2011 - L.A. musician rapper Everlast writes a song for these tough economic times singing "I barely get by" while he hits on cops, government, subprime mortgages and more.

"I Voted for some change and its kinda strange cause thats all i got in my pocket. I bought a few LEDS and I'm growing some trees its a sweet thing the DEA don't come knocking. I told y'all before that i would break the law to put food in my baby girls belly cause the senator man took a bribe in hand and shipped my job to New Delhi."

Check it out:

OCT 24, 2011 - Ry Cooder is a musical activist that is not afraid to speak out on issues, and his latest album, "Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down" hits on the bailout, immigration, war and more. From his website:

"His latest album, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down grew out of this information void—and the pervasive political and corporate double-speak that began swirling in its absence. Snaking through it are familiar themes—the struggle toward real democracy, the trials of the working man, the elusive goal of equality—set against the mayhem of contemporary front page news. [It] has been Cooder’s way to consider some complex questions, to pull back the curtain on the “official stories” by applying a healthy dose of reporter-style skepticism. The album gives “voice” to those affected by corporate greed, self-serving legislation, a culture of fear and hate—and the corrosive nature of apathy.

Consequently, these 14 songs—voices from the wreckage—work as a meditation on not just the state of the union or of the world, but really the state of our hearts and minds—our priorities and values. What happened to the concept of community? Who are we behind our fences and multi-billion dollar homes? What have we—or are poised to—become? Cooder sets these questions in motion, some as “eyewitness” soliloquies, others as allegories—in “El Corrido de Jesse James,” the erstwhile-bank robber asks God if he can have the .44 he checked at Heaven’s gates so he can clean up Wall Street. In “John Lee Hooker for President,” Cooder, fully inhabiting Hooker’s pace and flow, the musician re-appears to make a run for the presidency after being turned away from the White House door."