Tag Archives: revolution

This Is Illegal Music – Let’s All Share It

Mehdi Rajabian once served two years, of a larger sentence, in prison in Tehran, Iran, for making music. The oppression the government shows artists in the country is immense but some people, like Mehdi, continue to create beauty despite the threat of incarceration.

His latest work needs to be shared by the rest of us who are not facing the same hardship. This beautiful album, which can be streamed below, features artists from 12 middle eastern countries and includes songs recorded during war and during an escape on a boat by a refugee.

Mehdi Rajabian on Facebook
Mehdi’s profile on Freemuse

Cover photo ©Mehdi Rajabian

Free West Papua: 5 Songs Supporting The People

For many of us, West Papua is at the other side of the world, isolated and unknown. For others, the place is a well known human rights violation pit. Throughout the recent history of this occupied piece of land the people there have seen around half a million of their fellow natives be killed.

The fight is ongoing and the West Papua people ‘will not rest‘ until they are granted a referendum from Indonesia.

The occupied territory has long been put into song to support the people. Here are five songs titled ‘Free West Papua’.

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Cover photo disclaimer: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). Link to original photo here.

30 Years Since The Singing Revolution

30 years ago, on the 23rd of August, 2 million people from three neighboring nations, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, locked their arms together and formed a human chain that stretched across the three countries.

The people demanded freedom from the Soviet Union and did so in a peaceful way. In Tallinn, Estonia, people gathered regularly at the a music festival ground bursting into spontaneous mass singing. From those events the term ‘Singing Revolution’ was coined.

More commonly known as ‘The Baltic Way’ this revolution saw millions of people organizing for their freedom and finding common grounds between each other through, among other things, music.

Boris Reznik composed the song below for this occasion and it is sung in the three languages, a somewhat of a mutual anthem for the three countries.