Last month I spent two weeks in the Twin Cities, my annual sojourn to my wife Andrea Carney, who lives in Eagan, a suburb of Saint Paul. We didn’t visit memorials to the recently fallen, although we did drive past the Whipple Building where ICE jails abductees (on the way to celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary). Local network newscasts continue to cover roundups and reactions. We learned ICE was moving to the ’burbs, but we hadn’t seen that there. Nonetheless, we counseled our Filipina daughter-in-law to carry her passport.
I didn’t take in any live music while I was in Eagan, but I’ve been thinking it’s time to share a few songs sung in resistance to ICE as well as that exhibited in Gaza and the West Bank.
I just missed a January 30 appearance at Minneapolis’s historic club First Avenue by Tom Morello (ex Rage Against the Machine) and others. as a benefit for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Morello was joined by Rise Against, Al Di Meola (!), Ike Reilly, and a (Very Special Guest), documented below. The “boo”s you’ll hear are an indication of the political persuasion of many in Morello’s audience.
While The Boss’s sentiment is pretty pedestrian, he does pay tribute to the fact that, following the earlier killings of Philando Castile and George Floyd, “a city aflame” in 2016 and 2020 now “fought fire and ice,” pun intended.
Singer-songwriter Jesse Welles posts what seems like a protest song a day. Again, a fairly straightforward, realist report.
Some of the numbers that follow are subtler and more nuanced. To wit, Mavis Staples, who simply reminds us that her faith is rooted in the dilemma of a (certain) stranger.
Next, Staples helps out Lucinda Williams with her low-key meditation on the karmic nature of, well, nature and the street.
Rapper Consequence teams up with Public Enemy’s Chuck D to turn on its ear JFK’s famous challenge regarding what can be done.
British singer-songwriter Will Varley is a visual artist also, and he brings his artist’s eye to lines like
And the music on the adverts plays like prisoners of war
Who’ve been forced to sell the weapons that they used to abhor
A discussion of the double-edged sword of outrageousness follows. It’s Belfast band Kneecap’s stock in trade, but Trade trumps all.
Crass cofounder Steve Ignorant explains that it’s no wonder we harvest carnage, when we remunerate the r(e)aper.
Van Dyke Parks discusses the American Dream in the context of the Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains.”
The Times wrote that Parks’s album Tokyo Rose “ploughs its charming, obscure and highly original furrow, faintly evoking Gilbert and Sullivan or Rodgers and Hammerstein rather than any discernable acknowledgement of rock, soul or pop.” Here, Tod Maffin displays his own brand of nationalism via these Victorians.
Cheekface provides the soundtrack to the late Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.
Timely cover.
I usually steer clear of AI-generated material, but this one’s for Andrea.
In all the television coverage of what’s belittled by the phrase “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, I’m struck by the contradictions exhibited by the following. The crystal chandelier in an underground bunker speaks to a resilience that cannot be extinguished.
In “Death of Love,” James Blake channels Leonard Cohen, literally. He lifts and samples from Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “You Want it Darker,” including the latter’s “Hineni” (Hebrew: Here I am) as well as its vocal arrangement. “People are losing interest” is an indictment of the private and public predicament.
In my first collection Everybody Dance Now 1, I spotlighted some numbers that feature choreographic compulsion, even contagion (see the late Avicii’s “Levels“). Here Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds portrays movement as…
Speaking of compulsion, Ulster native Lisa O’Neill’s “The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right” was my impetus for posting these expressions of resistance. It is unapologetic in its sentiment and sentimentality.
“Life is Scary Horses” brings together two of my favorite singers, Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) and Sally Timms (of Mekons). I offer this after a trans-Pacific conversation tonight with my brother Richard Hughes concerning something to be concerned about.