Tag: music

Dionne Warwick will attend a Harlem Town Hall along with doctors, patients, activists, and a few show business friends (Rosie Perez, Michael Kenneth Williams from “The Wire,” Sheryl Lee Ralph from “Dreamgirls”) and join in a discussion of AIDS, its effects on urban communities, and steps being taken to find treatments and an eventual cure. Ms. Warwick has been involved in AIDS awareness and activism since the 1980s, when her valet started being diagnosed with the disease.

Read more here.

Lady Gaga has been very active in speaking out abut LGBT issues, such as Tweeting "Bullying must become be illegal. It is a hate crime. I am meeting with our President, I will not stop fighting. This must end. Our generation has the power to end it. Trend it #MakeALawForJamey". Jamey Rodemeyer is a 14 year-old who took his life after facing bullying in school for being gay. On September 24, Lady Gaga was live at the iHeartRadio music festival at the MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and talked to the audience before she performed "Hair", and dedicated the song to Jamey. She said, "I wrote this record about how your identity is really all you’ve got when you’re in school ... so tonight, Jamey, I know you’re up there looking at us, and you’re not a victim. You're a lesson to all of us." Watch the performance below.

Tom Morello, aka “The Nightwatchman”, was on Real Time with Bill Maher last night, and he talked about censorship, and he let his feelings known on the issue of musicians and bands, and for that matter any worker, speaking out on the issues they care about. They first discussed censorship, where Tom pointed out how after 9/11 there was a list of songs radio stations were asked not to play; like for instance “Imagine” by John Lennon, “Walk Like and Egyptian”, the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” and others.

Tom proudly proclaimed, “From that entire list, there was only one band where their entire catalogue was singled out, and that was my band, Rage Against the Machine”. The audience roared with approval and screamed out “Yeah!” He went on to say, “There was a message behind that. No one can say anything. It was a time where there should have been a great deal of debate. Why did this [9/11] really happen? What’s going on? Is there more to it than crazy guys on planes? That was a time when everyone we should have been able to speak their minds fully and completely, and let’s have a better understanding. ”

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Ozomatli is a "cuture masher" band out of LA that are described as "notorious urban-Latino-and-beyond collision of hip hop and salsa, dancehall and cumbia, samba and funk, merengue and comparsa, East LA R&B and New Orleans second line, Jamaican raggae and Indian raga". For fifteen years they have grown up as a band on the streets of LA, and have recently been named by the US State Department as Cultural Ambassadors. They have done “hip hop ghetto plays” at inner-city elementary schools, to community activist events, protests, and city fundraisers.

On their website they say, "Ozomatli has spent 15 years working diligently to spread its message of peace, communication and understanding through music, with a long standing tradition of performing for children all over the world.."

Watch a video below of the band on Ozomotli Day, helping to promote education for children, and check them out here.

Entertainers Ashanti, Jennifer Lopez and Ne-Yo, along with other celebrities such as Ron Howard and Denzel Washington, appear in a PSA asking for support of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, showing how young people, especially minorities, need places to go such as music schools and libraries. Ron Howard directed the PSA, which launches the "Great Futures Start Here" campaign, and you can watch it below. 

Check out the Press Release here.