Tag Archives: hiphop

DJ Generals Strike’s top 40 protest songs of spring 2024

July 18, 2024 Halldór H Kristínarson Leave a comment

I’m DJ General Strike, host of the weekly protest music radio show, Protest Tunes on 91.3 KBCS FM in Seattle, WA. I broadcast 2 hours of radical protest music of all genres and eras every Wednesday at 9 PM. Every quarter, I put together a radio show and playlist of my favorite new protest songs released that season, which I call “molotov hot tracks.” This Spring, saw the release of many great protest songs, most notably songs about the recent British parliamentary election and the upcoming US presidential election, songs against Israel’s ongoing war/genocide in Gaza, and songs of LGBTIA Pride. I aired most of these songs on my show this Wednesday (July 10th 2024), which you can listen to the archive of here. I’ve organized these 40 protest songs by genre below (and alphabetically within genre). You can also listen to all 40 songs on this Spotify Playlist. I hope you all are inspired by these molotov hot tracks!

Folk

Adeem the Artist – White Mule, Black Man

Adeem the Artist, AKA Adeem Maria, a nonbinary pansexual poet, singer-songwriter, storyteller, and blue-collar artist. A seventh-generation Carolinian, they now reside in the hills of East Tennessee. They started their music career performing on cruise ships. This track about the history of racism in Knoxville, TN is off Adeem’s new album Anniversary, released May 3rd.

Apes of the State – Forensic Files feat. Local News Legend

Apes of the State is an independent Lancaster, PA based folk punk band. As a band, they are driven by DIY ethics with a goal of helping as many people as possible with their music. The members are also heavily involved in activism for people recovering from substance use disorder and promoting harm reduction. This single released May 3rd, features fellow feminist folk punk duo Local News Legend, also from central Pennsylvania.

Carsie Blanton – The Democrats

Carsie Blanton is a singer-songwriter and guitarist based in New Orleans. Blanton says she “writes anthems for a world worth saving.” About this single released May 31st, she said it’s a “f— the democratic party for sitting on its hands during a genocide” kind of a song.

Troy Cassar-Daley – Windradyne

Troy Cassar-Daley is an Aboriginal Australian country music songwriter and entertainer. His mother is from the Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people. Cassar-Daley has released thirteen studio albums, two live albums and five compilation albums over 30 years. Windradyne tells the tale of the Indigenous warrior and resistance leader of the Wiradjuri nation from the 1800s.

Ani DiFranco – New Bible

Grammy winning feminist folk-rock singer-songwriter, author and activist. One of the first artists to create her own label in 1990, she is called ‘the mother of the DIY movement’ and has sold over 5.5 million albums on her own Righteous Babe Records. New Bible is an anti-capitalist song, the 2nd single off her upcoming album Unprecedented Sh!t’, Ani’s 23rd release, just released July 12th.

John Moreland – The Future Is Coming Fast

Moreland is a Singer-songwriter from Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is the opening track off his new album, Visitor, which Moreland recorded at his home in Bixby, Oklahoma, in only ten days, playing nearly every instrument himself, as well as engineering and mixing the album. On “The Future Is Coming Fast”, Moreland laments the “perpetually logged-on life in a time of catastrophe.”

David Rovics – This Is Genocide

Rovics is a Portland, OR based activist singer-songwriter, and anti-Zionist Jew from New York. In order to spread the political messages in his songs Rovics has made all of his recorded music freely available as downloadable mp3 files and all his sheet music and lyrics are available for download too at davidrovics.com. This song against Israel’s war on Gaza is off Rovics new album Bearing Witness, released May 1st.

Aaron Lee Tasjan – I Love America Better Than You

Aaron Lee Tasjan is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer, formerly of the bands Semi Precious Weapons and BP Fallon & The Bandits. About this song, Tasjan said “As a queer person living in the southern United States in 2024, I am examining my country’s complexities, contradictions and hard truths in a way that’s conversational.”

Frank Turner – The Leaders

Frank Turner is an English punk and folk singer-songwriter who began his career as the vocalist of post-hardcore band Million Dead, then embarked upon a primarily acoustic-based solo career following the band’s split in 2005. This anti-authoritarian song off Turner’s new album Undefeated, is a rewrite of an old unreleased song of his called Practical Anarchist.

Rock

Joe & The Shit boys – LEGALIZE EVERYTHING

Joe & The Shit boys are a queer vegan indie-rock band “with hardcore vibes”, from the Faroe Islands, (the archipelago between Iceland and Norway). The band formed with the intention of calling out bad behavior in their conservative local music scene, which they describe as “filled with boneless homophobes and meat-eating misogynists.” In this short song they challenge the prohibition of all recreational drugs.

Ferocious Dog – Kleptocracy

Ferocious Dog are an English folk-punk band from Warsop, Nottinghamshire, England. Their fans are affectionately referred to as ‘Hell Hounds’. This song against corrupt politicians in Britain written on the occasion of the British parliamentary elections is the title track off their new album released May 17th.

Melody Angel – Say Her Name

Melody Angel (which is her real name) is a Chicago based blues-rock guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, vocalist, arranger, and producer. She’s also a cousin of Chicago blues icon, Otis Rush. This song off her self titled 3rd album released June 7th, raises awareness for Black women victims of police brutality.

Scarlet Rebels – Divide and Conquer

Scarlet Rebels are a five-piece melodic rock band from Llanelli, South Wales, formed in 2018. They’re known for their efforts to raise money and collect donations for local food banks and charities. This protest song against Britain’s ruling Conservative Party is from their upcoming album, “Where The Colours Meet” due out August 16th.

R&B/Pop

Emma Donovan – Change is Coming

Emma Donovan is an Aboriginal Australian singer and songwriter formerly of bands the Stiff Gins and the Putbacks. She is a member of the renowned Australian musical Donovan family. She started her singing career at age seven with her uncle’s band, Australian Aboriginal country group the Donovans. This hopeful political song is off her new solo album Til My Song Is Done released April 19th.

The Secret Sisters – If the World Was a House

The Secret Sisters are a singing and songwriting duo consisting of vocalists Laura Rogers and Lydia Rogers, who are sisters from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. About this song, they said “it is wrestling with a longing for everyone to take better care of each other, and to recognize that every person you share the planet with matters just as much as you do.”

Reggae/Ska

Buju Banton – Slogan

Buju Banton is a Jamaican dancehall, ragga, and reggae singer, from Kingston, Jamaica. Buju is a nickname given to him by his mother as a child. Banton is a Jamaican word that refers to someone who is a respected storyteller, which he adopted in tribute to deejay Burro Banton, who’s style of rough vocals and forceful delivery Buju emulates. Buju released this single about the media’s political spin on May 3rd.

YG Marley – Survival

YG Marley is the son of American rapper and singer Lauryn Hill and Jamaican football player Rohan Marley, and the grandson of reggae pioneer Bob Marley. This song about black resilience, which samples and references a handful of Bob Marley tracks, made its premiere on “The Tonight Show”, May 14th, in which Lauryn Hill performed alongside YG Marley.

Black Roots – Exploited

Black Roots are a roots reggae band from Bristol, England, formed in 1979. This track about the legacy of slavery and European colonialism is off their new album Roots, released in April.

Jazz/Spoken Word

The Brkn Record – Why do they fear us (featuring Yolanda Lear)

The Brkn Record is a project led and produced by Jake Ferguson, the co-founder and bass player for the UK’s deep jazz outfit the Heliocentrics, with fellow Heliocentrics co-founder and drummer Malcolm Catto. This song about blackphobia is off The Brkn Record’s new album, The Architecture of Oppression Part 2 released May 31st.

Hip Hop

Audio Assault – STRIKE!

Audio Assault is a political techno-industrial rap band originally from Dallas, Texas, one of the first acts to combine hip hop, industrial rhythms and rock guitars. This single released May 21st, features hip-hop legend Kool Keith, disco-industrial artist Xiu Xiu , punk-hiphop artist Ceschi (of Codafendents), Denver rapper and author Time (of Calm), and Bay Area artist Yunoka Berry (of Angelo Moore & The Brand New Step).

Dakota Bear x NugLife – Stolen Land

Dakota Bear is a Saskatoon-born, Vancouver-based Indigenous hip-hop artist and activist. NugLife is an LA based producer, beat-maker, and DJ. This song is off Nuglife’s album Nuglife 2024 released in April, and is about the colonization and genocide of the first nations peoples of Canada.

Dobby – Language is in the Land

Dobby is a Filipino-Aboriginal Australian musician. He describes himself as a “drapper”, a contraction of rapper and drummer, although he plays other instruments too, and is also a composer. This track is off Dobby’s new album WARRANGU: River Story, about the Barwon, the Bogan and the Culgoa Rivers in New South Wales, which he says is “about fighting for these rivers, and it’s about knowing how to be proud and how to take care of our land and waterways.”

Gabriel Teodros – Fire Season Part 2

Gabriel Teodros is a musician, DJ and writer from Seattle formerly of the groups Abyssinian Creole and Copperwire. Teodros’ music often features socially conscious themes, and he was a catalyst in the surge of dynamic underground rap acts from the Pacific Northwest during the first decade of the 2000s. This followup to his 2023 anti-war song Fire Season was released May 31st.

K!MMORTAL – Stop Business As Usual PART 2 feat. Phoenix Pagliacci & Bobby Sanchez

Kimmortal is a Queer Filipina emcee and singer-songwriter based in Vancouver, BC. Their debut album Sincerity = was entirely crowd funded by her community. In this follow up to Kimmortal’s November single against Israel’s war on Gaza, Stop Business As Usual, they feature Toronto R&B/Hip-Hop artist Phoenix Pagliacci of TRPP and transgender American-Peruvian rapper Bobby Sanchez.

Mach-Hommy – POLITickle

Mach-Hommy is a rapper and record producer from Newark, New Jersey of Haitian descent. He is well-known for his reclusive nature, concealing his real name and face in all public appearances. This behavior has led him to be described as “one of hip-hop’s most elusive artists” and gained him a cult following. POLITickle is about the International Monetary Fund in Haiti and is off his new album #Richaxxhaitian released May 17th.

Rapsody – He Shot Me

Rapsody began her career at North Carolina State University, where she joined hip hop collective H2O and its spinoff group Kooley High, despite not having rapped before. She launched her solo career in 2008. This song off her new album Please Don’t Cry is about the police murder of Breona Taylor, and samples Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”.

Rebelwise – Be Like Water (feat. Aya Iworiosa, Stic.Man, Ashel Seasunz & Quincy Davis)

Rebelwise are a conscious hip hop band from Portland, OR. They describe themselves as “Rebelwise delivers dope-medicine to uplift our people and our communities.” “REBEL speaks to the spiritual warriors standing with conviction. WISE speaks to engaging with a deeper awareness, in relationship with Creation.” This song off their new album Fully Loaded Altar, features Stic.Man, one half of the political hip-hop duo Dead Prez.

Talib Kweli & Madlib – Nat Turner (feat. Cassper Nyovest and Seun Kuti)

Talib Kweli earned recognition through his collaboration with fellow Brooklyn rapper Mos Def, when they formed the group Black Star in 1997. Madlib, is a DJ, music producer, and rapper, who has described himself as a “DJ first, producer second, and MC last.” Their new album Liberation 2 released in April is a sequel to their 2007 release Liberation. This track was inspired by abolitionist Nat Turner, an enslaved man who led a rebellion of enslaved people in 1831 in Virginia.

Macklemore – Hind’s Hall

The Seattle star rapper released this viral protest single on May 6th. The title references Columbia University Gaza encampment activists’ renaming of Hamilton Hall to “Hind’s Hall” in honor of Hind Rajab, a Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces. Tom Morello said “Hind’s Hall” is the most Rage Against The Machine song since Rage Against The Machine.” Macklemore is donating all proceeds from the track to UNRWA.

Metal/Hardcore

Bear McCreary and Serj Tankian- Incinerator

Bear McCreary is an Emmy winning composer of film, television, and video game scores. This single featuring System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian on vocals is from Bear’s new double album The Singularity. About the song, Bear said “Once I heard Serj’s searing vocals, I knew immediately that Incinerator would be the first song on the album, acting like a warning that a massive, aggressive, and emotional journey lay ahead.”

CROSS DOG – Jane Roe

Cross Dog is a female fronted experimental, bass-driven hardcore punk band from Peterborough, Ontario. In this pro-choice single from their new album All Hard Feelings, the name ‘Jane Roe’ is used to “represent every single person who is forced to fight for their reproductive rights and access to abortions.”

Death Lens – Disturb The Peace

Death Lens originally formed in LA as an instrumental project, then evolved as they began using their platform to protest injustices facing their communities. This song, off their new album Cold World, is “a song written for the people, inspired by the people, and for my people – like my immigrant parents who came to the chaos of America to give us a better life and opportunity,” says vocalist Bryan Torres.

Tom Morello – Soldier In The Army Of Love

Tom Morello, is a guitarist, singer-songwriter, and political activist, best known for his tenure with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. This new solo single, off his upcoming solo rock album, Morello calls the song “a salute to the transformative power of music”. It features a guest guitar solo by his 13-year-old son, Roman Morello.

Punk

The Anti-Queens – Crusade

The Anti-Queens are a “punked up rock n’ roll quartet of super high-powered women who give the male-dominated music industry a run for their money” from Toronto. This single off their new album, Disenchanted, explores the systemic oppression faced by marginalized groups, particularly Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

The Irrepressibles – Yo Homo

The Irrepressibles is the creative guise of British musician Jamie McDermott. The project’s name is “about breaking boundaries in music and being honest about being gay in music”. Based in London, for many years, Jamie Irrepressible currently works from Manchester. Yo Homo! is a single about gay & queer rebellion released May 24th.

Lambrini Girls – Body of Mine

Lambrini Girls are a queer feminist three-piece punk band from Brighton, UK. About this single released April 23rd, The band says, “this song is about trying to connect to your gender identity, feeling like you’re not fully yourself, and struggling to figure out how to truly become it.”

Pink Suits – Dystopian Hellscape

Pink Suits are a queer, feminist punk duo out of Margate, U.K, formed in 2017. This is the title track off their sophomore album Dystopian Hellscape, which they describe as “an astute and comprehensive reaction to existing in the mess that is Tory Britain in 2024.” The track uses contemporary news stories to “create a tapestry of struggle that builds up in a horrifying picture of contemporary life.”

Ryan Cassata & The Top Surgeons – The Truth The Life The Way

Ryan Cassata is a transgender singer-songwriter, actor, speaker, and activist based in New York. This is the opening track off Ryan’s first punk album, with new band The Top Surgeons, called “This Machine Kills Transphobia”. They describe the album as “a collection of punk songs meant to challenge systems of oppression, especially sexism and transphobia.”

The Tony Slug Experience – Puppet Smut

This track, featuring Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys is off the self-titled album, The Tony Slug Experience, an homage to Amsterdam punk pioneer Tony Slug, of bands BGK, Loveslug, The Nitwitz, and The Hydromatics. An international group of over 30 musicians contributed to what became Tony’s final record; right after all recordings were on tape, Tony died at the age of 60 after a brief battle with throat cancer.

Lady Parts – Glass Ceiling Feeling

Lady Parts is a band created for the British sitcom, We Are Lady Parts, created, written, and directed by Nida Manzoor, who alongside her siblings, also writes and supervises the music for the show. The series follows a British punk rock band named Lady Parts, which consists entirely of Muslim women. This track is off the show’s soundtrack, We Are Lady Parts (Music From The Original Series – Seasons 1 & 2) released May 31st.

Interview

Amplifying humanitarian perspectives through music: An interview with Fold.

February 29, 2024 Shouts - Music from the Rooftops! 1 Comment

The Fold crew is here to remind us that there are good things in this world that are worth fighting for.

FOLD — from left to right: Sam Hutchison, James Child, Seth Mowshowitz and Phil Hepworth

Out of Leeds, UK, comes a rather unique kind of band. It’s impossible to lock their music in a genre box and throw away the key, but what is possible is to understand what they stand for. Their website states clearly that they are a music collective who’s goal is to “amplify undervalued perspectives and critical reflections on today’s world.”

With the help of guest MC’s, poets, and sometimes aided by sound bites from thinkers, writers, journalists, the Fold crew uses its talents to add a positive, critical and constructive commentary into today’s rather awful looking society.

Halldór Kristínarson: The world is looking pretty bleak at the moment. What makes you feel hopeful or positive these days?

Band Members: For us as a group, humour and laughter are key. Our music is quite emotional and usually deals with serious subjects but in between we’re always finding ways to make each other laugh. If you ever come to our gigs the banter is almost like a miniature standup comedy show woven into cracks of the set. We send each other silly GIFs & videos all the time in our group chat.

As bell hooks said: “We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humour. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humourless, they fail. Humour is essential to the investigative balance that we need to deal with diversity and the building of community.”

Seth Mowshowitz: It really is looking bleak, that can’t be denied. You have to embrace it, but not all the time. Finding a balance of dipping in and out the news cycle is essential. I do things every day for at least an hour that keep me mindful and stop me from ruminating. That includes tending a fire in my wood-burner on cold days, playing nerdy collectible card games from the 90s, reading and above all working on music.

What gives me hope personally most of all are my kids (11 & 15) because they have become such wonderful, decent human beings despite the world they’re having to grow up in. Another thing that gives me hope is the fact that we are finally seeing the cracks start to show in the façade of public discourse. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, as horrible as it is, has not only radicalised a generation but also opened the eyes of more than ever before to the hypocrisy of mainstream narratives, the western political establishment and the system as a whole that cannot be closed again.

HK: Has your music always been made in protest, or with a conscious message?

BM: Yes, from day one. We describe ourselves as being dedicated to amplifying humanitarian perspectives and critical reflections on today’s world. It took 12 years to come up with that summary [laughs]. It is about communicating complex subjects through the democratisation of language—a kind of translation into something simpler, poetic and more evocative that people can connect with and relate to better than academic texts and political rhetoric. Sometimes that takes the form of carefully edited interview snippets, or poems, or MCs rhyming bars or just good old song lyrics. We consider ourselves a collective in that we invite many different voices into the Fold (see what we did there) in order to represent as diverse a range of perspectives as possible.

HK: With your latest track, titled Forever War, you mention how recent horrors in Gaza drove you to write that song. But singing against, and simply being against, the military-industrial complex seems, at least to an outsider like myself who is from a country without a military, to be a very complicated thing. The military looks almost like a religious entity in certain countries and it seems to me, that for some countries, it is almost a blasphemy to speak bad of ‘the troops‘. What is your experience of using your voice, critizising the military and the government funding it? Or your experience from observing dissidents who do so?

BM: That’s a big question. To the first part about speaking bad of the troops, we would never disrespect the soldier. We recognise that aside from the victims on the receiving end of war the people who pay the highest price are the soldiers who fight it. We have enormous respect for anyone who believes in the cause of fighting for their loved ones and enlist for that reason, or, as is often the case in the US among underprivileged groups, when it is the only road to a subsidised education or providing for loved ones. The sad truth is that the soldier is more often than not being manipulated as a disposable pawn in a game for profit by the military-industrial complex which has zero regard for the value of human life, whether that of the soldier or the civilian casualty. In his book War Is a Racket (1935) General SD Butler argues that a major part of how we can ‘smash the war racket’ is to invest those who are actually going to fight the war with the exclusive ability to vote on whether or not war should happen via a limited referendum. We reckon that’s a very good idea.

What we’re criticising is the close relationship between defence contractors, the military chiefs and the politicians—that which comprises the military-industrial complex and exists in all countries that have a large enough defence budget, the US being by far the largest. Our argument is that this institution—again particularly in the US—has become so powerful that it now produces unnecessarily vast amounts of arms and lobbies governments to enable as many wars as possible that go on for as long as possible in order to sell as many of their largely unnecessary arms as possible. They push for wars without any clear conditions that would lead to their conclusion, which is what the term forever war refers to. In other words, these endless wars are being increasingly facilitated by the very industry that benefits most from them and resulting in more and more situations like Gaza or Ukraine.

In terms of our experience in using our voice to criticise the military-industrial complex, we seem to occupy a strangely safe ground. We’ve had no backlash whatsoever. It may well be that we haven’t reached a wide enough audience to be noticed by the more toxic elements within the discourse. It may also be that our existing audience expects exactly this from us. We’re nowhere near big enough yet to pose any kind of threat to the edifice of warmongering and profiteering.

Seth: As far as other dissidents who have spoken out against the machinery of war, I immediately think of whistleblowers Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and especially Chelsea Manning. I protested against the treatment of at least two of them outside the Magistrate’s Court in London when I still lived there. They were all direct threats to the global intelligence community, which is a scary place to be, and you could see from their treatment just how risky it is to pose any kind of substantial threat to those in control of that world. I’ve known this for a long time having studied the history of US-Latin American relations in university and having grown up with Chileans who were wanted by and escaped from the Pinochet regime. I’m an unusually anti-imperialist American in that respect.

HK: The video for the song is definitely uneasy to watch. But it‘s just real images of what we humans are capable of. Yet, I understand some people get upset with such things and prefer to not see the horrors. How has the reception to Forever War been so far and to your protest music in general?

BM: We worried about this when we released the video, which is why we made it 18+ on YouTube. TikTok removed one of the two excerpts we uploaded for violating community guidelines due to the images of genocide and Nazi rallies. We didn’t appeal. On the whole, again, the exposure has been so minimal that it hasn’t really mattered. The feedback we’ve had so far is incredibly positive. The video does at least successfully communicate what we wanted it to even if it is highly doubtful that it’ll get significant exposure. We have absolutely no doubt that it would deeply offend someone if it was shown to enough people but if that sparks thought and emotion that leads to discussion then we’ve done our job properly.

We’ve been doing this a long time now, since around 2012. The overall response in that time has been overwhelmingly positive. A few times during our live performances news of world events filtered into the room and certain tracks were able to reflect the zeitgeist in those moments, appealing to our shared humanity and connecting us to the audience in a profound way. There was this powerful sense of a collective consciousness that could be overwhelming at times. Moments like that have made the entire project worthwhile.

We’ve been fortunate in never having played to an audience that wasn’t receptive to our approach. That may well be partly down to working consistently with promoters and venues that are appropriate to our type of music (they wouldn’t book us at children’s parties), partly down to luck and partly down to the approach itself. We’re not telling people what to do or how to feel, we’re simply reflecting those parts of the world that most of us find difficult to look at.

HK: Why can music be such an effective form of protest?

BM: The synergy of words and music has the capacity to unite people, to galvanise movements and to give a voice to the voiceless that connects on both an intellectual and emotional level more than words or music alone. The reasons for this are enormously complex & fascinating. There’s a wonderful, illuminating book called The World In Six Songs that explains how our brains have evolved to be musical and the many—often undervalued—functions and roles music plays in our individual and societal make up. For instance, before the written word, music was used as a primary means of encoding information such as sacred ancestral stories. It is far easier for our brains to remember lengthy texts when set against a sequence of repeated musical patterns. Drums have been used since the dawn of civilisation to coordinate action, especially in combat to intimidate opponents. We could go on for days about this.

When it comes to capturing and expressing the zeitgeist—especially when the zeitgeist is being simultaneously hijacked and deformed to fit nefarious agendas by corporate media and politicians—few things can match the synergy of words and music. The right song at the right time can lend expression to an entire generation and unite them under its banner. Within that song, the right language at the right time can provide people with a means of easily sharing a complex perspective with others, thereby expediting the spread of that perspective. This happened numerous times on a massive scale in the 60s and 70s especially.

However, since the reliance on social media and streaming platforms to amplify our music has become so ubiquitous we have begun to wonder whether or not certain algorithms play a substantial role in suppressing those perspectives that are deemed a threat to mainstream narratives and power structures.

Whenever we release music, particularly if it deals with very difficult subjects like our latest single Forever War, it is extremely tricky to discern the difference between people simply not connecting with the music versus algorithmic suppression of the content. The fact that there are so few No. 1 hits in the history of these streaming platforms (roughly over the last 3 decades) that amplify controversial humanitarian perspectives, or more traditionally could be called protest songs, says an awful lot. Only Childish Gambino’s This Is America managed to buck the trend and that was largely due to word of mouth and a visually-led campaign in the form of a brilliant video that went viral. Only a handful of No. 1 hits in the past 3 decades have had substantial social or political subject matter. 2020 sparked a surge in protest music but virtually none of that made it ‘big.’

Of course there’s always been a direct human factor in this kind of suppression. Music that is overtly sociopolitical has long held a certain stigma in music media with the occasional exception breaking through such as Rage Against the Machine. Also one key difference between physical sales and streaming is that the former requires a higher degree of agency in the listener. They have to go out and buy the music in order to listen to it. The way that people consume music now is much more ephemeral, throw-away and reliant on algorithms or curators to choose it for them. It is a much more passive kind of listening and therefore easier to control.

Photo retrieved from the band’s website.

HK: Who are your musical inspirations? Do you follow other contemporary protest musicians or conscious artists that you‘d like to give a shout out to?

Seth: Sooooo many. Longer term: Public Enemy, Black Sabbath, Sepultura, Arthur Verocai, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Sly & the Family Stone, James Brown, War, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Black Thought, Stereolab, Radiohead, Lali Puna, Bikini Kill and Rage Against the Machine to name a few.

Recent inspirations: Kendrick Lamar, Brother Ali, Lowkey, Childish Gambino and some of Dave’s earlier stuff like Question Time.

Smaller, local acts: Oakley Riot, Broken Opium Table and the Commoners Choir.

HK: If music was not your greatest passion, what would you be doing to make the world a better place?

Seth: Because I’m autistic (undiagnosed) along with both of my children (diagnosed) I am a constant advocate for better understanding of neurodivergence. I’d probably be more focused on that if I wasn’t so absorbed with music. A lot of what I do outside of music could be classed as delivering social commentary. I guess a big part of my raison d’être is to try and help make sense of this crazy world for myself and others. I also spent many years as a professional web designer for charities. I do love design and I am quite passionate about the role of design in improving people’s lives. More than anything else though I think I’d probably focus on writing.

HK: What‘s on the horizon for the Fold crew?

BM: We only just came back to gigging towards the end of 2023 after a 3.5 year, pandemic-imposed hiatus. The two gigs we did in September and November were fantastic craic, loads of people came and we all had a fabulous time. So this year we are doing more gigs for sure. The next one is at The Old Woollen in Leeds on March 21 in fact, and our 3-piece horn section—who haven’t been on stage with us for a very long time—will be there too.

We are currently planning a few experimental live performances (TBC) including a hybrid live podcast show where we balance segments of speaking to / with the audience and live music. Also, we’re looking to bring other kinds of performers on stage including a Shibari artist.

We’re always writing new material as well. The plan is to hire a little cottage in the middle of nowhere and record the next batch of tracks in the coming months. We’ve had a run of 6 single releases since the last album to keep up momentum so we are overdue a more substantial release and that will definitely be happening this year.

HK: People are reading from around the world. Anything else you‘d like to shout from the rooftops?

BM: We love the notion of people checking in from all over the world, it never gets old. Despite how bleak things look today the world is still a wonderful, beautiful place full of amazing people. Our diversity and sense of community are our greatest strengths. What is worth shouting? Never give into fear or despair. There is always hope. Let us work together to end all forms of domination from a place of love.

“The imperial need for control is so desperate because it’s so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

— Nemik’s manifesto (Andor / Star Wars)

activism, News

Icelandic rapper organises a concert, raising funds to get his family out of Gaza

February 21, 2024 Shouts - Music from the Rooftops! Leave a comment

A young rapper from Iceland, with family ties to Gaza, has organised a benefit concert and gotten the help from some heavy hitters from the country’s hiphop scene.

Alexander was born and raised in Iceland and has never experienced life in a war zone. However, his father is from Gaza and now the young rapper’s plan is to raise enough funds so he can travel to the Egypt-Gaza border and help family members to safety, namely his grandmother and his uncle and family.

Alexander’s family members in Gaza are not immediate family and therefore he can not apply for asylum for them on grounds of family unification in Iceland. But after seeing on the news how three Icelandic activists travelled to Egypt to retrieve families out of Gaza, because of lack of effort by the Icelandic government, he thought maybe he could do the same.

For the benefit concert, Alexander got the support of some popular members of the contemporary Icelandic hiphop scene, such as Birnir, Flóni, Krabbamane and others, who are donating their performance to the cause.

If you find yourself in Iceland this Saturday, perhaps to admire the fresh lava, you could do a lot worse then stopping by this concert and helping the Abu-Samrah family get out of harm’s way.

When: Saturday 24 February 2024
Where: IÐNÓ, Reykjavík
How much: 5,900 Icelandic kronas (42 USD, 39 EUR)
Alternative ways to support:
Icelandic ID number: 040991-2049
Account number: 0370-26-010964
IBAN: IS620370260109640409912049
SWIFT: ESJAISRE