Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Islamist Extremists Ban Ali Farka Toure's Music in His Hometown
The bastards:
from the BBC last month:
6 December 2012 Last updated at 12:24 ET
Blues for Mali as Ali Farka Toure's music is banned
By Thomas Fessy BBC News, Bamako
After making northern Mali's "Blues" music famous around the world, Ali Farka Toure is a legend in his home town of Niafunke, where he was mayor until his death in 2006.
The memorial to him is still intact but his music is no longer heard in the town's streets.
"The town has gone silent," says 28-year-old farmer Ousmane Maiga (not his real name) over the phone. "It's way too quiet".
Islamist fighters have taken over Niafunke, which sits on the banks of the river Niger 100km (60 miles) south-west of Timbuktu. They have introduced a strict social code: Women and girls must be covered, young men cannot wear loose trousers and all forms of music are banned. Residents say two young men were whipped last month after they were caught smoking tobacco.
Toure was just one of a host of stars who have turned music into one of Mali's best known exports.
"Music is so much part of our culture," says Mr Maiga. "It's everywhere here, I miss listening to it over tea with my friends on the weekend. I miss attending wedding ceremonies and baptisms."
All time great
It was the music of northern Mali that Toure took to the world, its lilting, mournful tones reaching an international audience when he teamed up with his US soulmate, Ry Cooder, to produce the Grammy-winning album Talking Timbuktu in 1994. He was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as among the 100 great guitarists of all time and starred in the Martin Scorsese documentary, Feel Like Going Home, which traced the roots of the blues back to West Africa. But these roots are now threatened. Niafunke and other towns in northern Mali have been plunged into a cultural darkness.
Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda have banned everything they deem to be against Sharia, or Islamic law.
"They are destroying our culture," says another of Mali's most famous singers, Salif Keita. He is currently back home in Mali, preparing for a world tour to accompany the release of his latest album.
"If there's no music, no Timbuktu, it means that there is no more culture in Mali," he adds, sitting in the grounds of his home on the small island he owns on the river Niger outside the capital, Bamako.
Keita is referring to the destruction in June of the ancient shrines in Timbuktu's mosques. The buildings were Unesco World Heritage Sites but considered by the Islamists to be idolatrous.
Dozens of musicians have fled south since the crisis began, among them Khaira Arby "the Voice of the North". She cannot return to her home in Timbuktu because Islamists have threatened to cut out her tongue, according to members of her band who have also fled south. She first stayed with a cousin but has resigned herself to renting a house in Bamako after she realised that she could be displaced for longer than she thought.
"Islamists have jammed radio airwaves," she tells me while her guitarists and percussionist adjust their instruments for an evening rehearsal in her small living-room.
The two guitars are plugged into one small amplifier producing a heavily distorted sound. The band's equipment was looted when rebels marched into Timbuktu. Arby sits on the edge of her sofa. She looks sad, but soon her eyes close and her voice climbs and falls with the guitar riffs.
Ringtones banned
Song completed, she tries to make sense of what is happening to her country. "They're even confiscating mobile phones and replacing ringtones with Koranic verses," she laments.
From Timbuktu to Gao, telephones have become the only way to listen to music lately. Those who have risked turning a stereo on have immediately attracted the attention of the Islamist police. Their equipment would be either seized or smashed.
Read the full story and additional information HERE.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Former North Korean Propaganda Artist Turns to Pop Art
CNN
After escape from North Korea, artist turns from propaganda to pop art
By Paul Ferguson, CNN
updated 12:26 AM EDT, Sun March 25, 2012
Atlanta (CNN) -- Song Byeok had every reason to be pleased with his success. A gift for drawing led to a prestigious career as a propaganda artist and full membership in North Korea's communist party.
Then the food shortages started.
Like tens of thousands of other North Koreans in the mid-1990s, Song made forays across the Tumen River to find food in China. Despite witnessing a better material life across the border, he says, he never doubted that North Korea was culturally superior. He never considered leaving his homeland for anything more than food.
"I was a believer. I saw North Koreans as pure," Song said. "And we needed the Great Leader to protect us from outsiders."
Today, Song paints in Seoul, South Korea, his art haunted by his former whole-hearted belief in the North Korean regime. Song's paintings chronicle a personal, often agonizing journey from child-like allegiance to the country's founder and "Great Leader," Kim Il Sung, and his son, "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, to Song's life today as a contemporary artist.
In his former life, he would paint boyish-looking soldiers with heroic features across an entire side of a factory to inspire workers with the same patriotism he believed in.
His current paintings explore themes of freedom while skewering his former devotion to North Korea's leaders. He paints children in military uniforms, their heads bowed and eyes closed. His trademark work shows Kim Jong Il's face atop Marilyn Monroe's famous film pose on a sidewalk grate, holding down her skirt as it billows around her hips.
The painting created a stir in South Korea, where American Greg Pence saw it and raised funds on Kickstarter to exhibit Song's work this winter in Washington and Atlanta.
Song is passionate and sometimes brooding when discussing North Korea but gracious and open about his deeply personal passage from propaganda artist to painter who anguishes over oppression in North Korea.
Song's journey to disbelief began the moment he watched, helpless, as his father was caught in a current during a river crossing to China and drowned. Song was halfway across when his father was swept away; he swam back but was unable to rescue him. Despondent, Song searched for his father's body along the riverbank but was captured by North Korean border guards.
Despite his rank as a party member, getting caught meant questioning and torture by North Korean guards to confirm that he was not working for the South Koreans or the foreign missionaries based in China who proselytize among defectors.
"There were no exceptions," he said. "All who are caught are investigated."
In North Korea, a brutal choice
The torment of not recovering his father's remains was much greater than the broken teeth and beatings, Song said. The beatings were so harsh, he said, he was close to death, and he believes that he was released so he would not die in custody.
More than bones, the guards' treatment broke Song's belief in the regime. He describes the moment he left jail as if a veil had been lifted: He saw the world with a new clarity. As he hobbled through the streets, wondering how he'd get home, he decided he wanted a different life. He decided to defect.
In a country of 25 million, only about 20,000 have defected and settled in South Korea, according to the South Korean government. There are no precise figures for how many defectors live in hiding in China; estimates from governments, researchers and non-governmental organizations vary from 25,000 to more than 400,000.
"When people are picked up in China and repatriated, they face prosecution back in North Korea if they are believed to have met with South Koreans or missionaries," said Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist at the Peterson Institute.
China labels North Korean escapees "economic migrants" and forcibly returns them despite accounts of torture and execution. So those hoping to defect must make their way across China to a third country.
Of those North Koreans interviewed in China, only about one in 10 say they left because of a longing for freedom, according to W. Courtland Robinson, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the issue for more than a decade.
The vast majority who leave give the same explanation Song did for his pre-defector forays into China during the famine: the search for work or food.
"The (North Korean) system is so integral to who you are," Robinson said. "People generally don't say 'I am frustrated, and I want out.' "
Song's paintings explore that theme: a devotion to serving North Korea's leaders so strong that citizens view it as part of their identity.
"Flower Children" shows a gaggle of smiling, uniformed schoolgirls waving and holding North Korea's standard reading primers, "The Story of Kim Jong Il's Childhood" and "History of Kim Il Sung."
The girls exude childish charm, but some faces show a weariness that only comes with age, and their eyes are all closed. Their shoes have holes.
"They believe they are happy," Song said. "They believe they are so much better off than the rest of the world because of their two leaders, who are like two suns."
Read the full story and view images HERE.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
China Preparing to Crack Down on Microblogs and Cultural Expression
NYT
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
2011 Hong Kong Opera Censored By Beijing? Opera Canceled Three Weeks Before Debut
SLATE via the Financial Times
Nixing In China
A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing.
Posted Sunday, Oct. 9, 2011, at 9:32 AM ET
For months, public structures in Hong Kong have been draped with dreary sepia-coloured banners, some as large as a small building, publicising a new opera about Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, the architect of the revolution of 1911 that brought down the Manchu dynasty. But the Hong Kong premiere on October 13 of a modern opera about a historical figure had created scarcely a musical ripple in the city, whose attention was turned towards upcoming concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and a sold-out recital by the pianist Murray Perahia.
Then, on September 30, the Beijing premiere of Dr Sun Yat-sen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was abruptly called off for “logistical reasons”, which pitchforked the issue on to the front pages of Hong Kong newspapers amid a plethora of conspiracy theories. The reasons mooted for the cancellation run from reported complaints by the National Council of Performing Arts in Beijing that the music was either not ready or “too modern” to be performed, to speculation that the love story of Sun and his third wife, Soong Ching-ling, who was 26 years his junior, was too racy for Beijing’s censors. Inevitably, there have also been plenty of hypotheses put forward in this technicoloured soap opera that the political content worried the cultural commissars in Beijing. Although Sun is feted in both Communist China and democratic Taiwan, his life is a minefield of sensitivities for Communist Chinese government censors – not least his support for pan-Asian co-operation with Japan, long seen as an enemy of China, his request in 1923 to the US and European governments to take over China’s provincial capitals to modernise them and his attempt towards the end of his life to curry favour with brutal Chinese warlords.
Read the full story HERE.
Nixing In China
A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing.
Posted Sunday, Oct. 9, 2011, at 9:32 AM ET
For months, public structures in Hong Kong have been draped with dreary sepia-coloured banners, some as large as a small building, publicising a new opera about Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, the architect of the revolution of 1911 that brought down the Manchu dynasty. But the Hong Kong premiere on October 13 of a modern opera about a historical figure had created scarcely a musical ripple in the city, whose attention was turned towards upcoming concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and a sold-out recital by the pianist Murray Perahia.
Then, on September 30, the Beijing premiere of Dr Sun Yat-sen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was abruptly called off for “logistical reasons”, which pitchforked the issue on to the front pages of Hong Kong newspapers amid a plethora of conspiracy theories. The reasons mooted for the cancellation run from reported complaints by the National Council of Performing Arts in Beijing that the music was either not ready or “too modern” to be performed, to speculation that the love story of Sun and his third wife, Soong Ching-ling, who was 26 years his junior, was too racy for Beijing’s censors. Inevitably, there have also been plenty of hypotheses put forward in this technicoloured soap opera that the political content worried the cultural commissars in Beijing. Although Sun is feted in both Communist China and democratic Taiwan, his life is a minefield of sensitivities for Communist Chinese government censors – not least his support for pan-Asian co-operation with Japan, long seen as an enemy of China, his request in 1923 to the US and European governments to take over China’s provincial capitals to modernise them and his attempt towards the end of his life to curry favour with brutal Chinese warlords.
Read the full story HERE.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Roentgenizdat: Soviet Era "X-Ray LPs" of Banned Western Recordings
From Weird Vibrations
October 12, 2009
Roentgenizdat: Sentimental Songs on X-Ray
In the 1950s, music enthusiasts in the Soviet Union made copies of banned Western records using sheets of x-ray film purchased from clinics and hospitals. Photographic film, like wax, acetate, or vinyl, is thick and firm enough to be used with commercially available music engraving machines. X-rays weren’t the ideal medium, being prone to warping, but they worked well enough, and were cheap to boot.
Comments on roentgenizdat have been floating around for a few years, and Princeton English professor Eduardo Cadava is writing a book on the subject, out soon.
Roentgenizdat are interesting, first, as a series of artifacts. Prefiguring picture disks, non-circular shapes, and other graphically novel record gimmicks, these albums feel like an early example of what few people got into until the 70s and 80s – experimentation with records as objects. Although dubbing onto x-ray was in this case a matter of political necessity rather than unprovoked aesthetic tinkering, the dubbers quite clearly paid attention to the images they chose, as well as the placement of the center holes.
.....
Read the entire post HERE.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Rappers Arrested in Iran
CNN
Young rappers arrested in Iran
By Reza Sayah, CNN
(CNN) -- Police in Tehran have arrested several members of underground Iranian rap groups, the semi-offical ILNA news agency reported.
Tehran Police Chief Hussain Sajedinia told ILNA that several young boys and girls were discovered using vacant homes to record and videotape illegal rap music for various websites and satellite networks.
Police raided the homes, arrested the young musicians and confiscated "western style musical instruments" and several bottles of liquor, according to ILNA.
The report did not specify when the raids took place, how many rappers were arrested, or how old they were.
"These groups use the most trashy, juvenile and street-like words and phrases that have no place in proper grammar," the police chief told ILNA. "More importantly, they have no regard for the law, principles, proper behavior and language."
Police were searching for a girl and several other of the young rappers after identifying them in material found during the search of the vacant homes, ILNA reported.
"A court order has been issued for the arrest of all of the accused and police in Tehran will make their utmost effort to arrest these people," Sajedinia told ILNA.
In Iran, rap and rock music is not a serious crime but is considered un-Islamic. Ignoring the laws against playing rap and rock music can lead to accusations of Satan worship and sentences of flogging or a night in jail.
It's not clear if the young Iranian rappers are still in jail or what they're being charged with.
Sajedinia accused Iran's underground rap scene of spreading profanity and poisoning young minds. He called for an increase in traditional Iranian music to counter the influence of rap music, ILNA reported.
"Those who have been arrested are among those who have veered away from proper behavior, who have distanced themselves from all of life's hardships and are in search of comforts that have no limits," he said.
Young rappers arrested in Iran
By Reza Sayah, CNN
(CNN) -- Police in Tehran have arrested several members of underground Iranian rap groups, the semi-offical ILNA news agency reported.
Tehran Police Chief Hussain Sajedinia told ILNA that several young boys and girls were discovered using vacant homes to record and videotape illegal rap music for various websites and satellite networks.
Police raided the homes, arrested the young musicians and confiscated "western style musical instruments" and several bottles of liquor, according to ILNA.
The report did not specify when the raids took place, how many rappers were arrested, or how old they were.
"These groups use the most trashy, juvenile and street-like words and phrases that have no place in proper grammar," the police chief told ILNA. "More importantly, they have no regard for the law, principles, proper behavior and language."
Police were searching for a girl and several other of the young rappers after identifying them in material found during the search of the vacant homes, ILNA reported.
"A court order has been issued for the arrest of all of the accused and police in Tehran will make their utmost effort to arrest these people," Sajedinia told ILNA.
In Iran, rap and rock music is not a serious crime but is considered un-Islamic. Ignoring the laws against playing rap and rock music can lead to accusations of Satan worship and sentences of flogging or a night in jail.
It's not clear if the young Iranian rappers are still in jail or what they're being charged with.
Sajedinia accused Iran's underground rap scene of spreading profanity and poisoning young minds. He called for an increase in traditional Iranian music to counter the influence of rap music, ILNA reported.
"Those who have been arrested are among those who have veered away from proper behavior, who have distanced themselves from all of life's hardships and are in search of comforts that have no limits," he said.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Afghanistan: Musicians Struggling To Revive Classical Heritage After Taliban
Radio Free Europe
By Country / Afghanistan
Afghanistan: Musicians Struggling To Revive Classical Heritage After Taliban
November 11, 2005
Decades of war and the Taliban's five-year ban on music took their toll on Afghan classical music. Musicians have been trying to resuscitate the art since the end of Taliban rule. But they face serious economic and artistic challenges -- including the threat of possible attack by Taliban fighters if they perform in provincial areas. Through interviews and field recordings, RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz has documented attempts to revive Afghan music since the collapse of the Taliban regime nearly four years ago.
Kabul, 11 November 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Three warring Afghan militia factions in Wardak Province put their disputes aside long enough in early 2002 to celebrate a feast together in the district of Chak.
Hundreds gathered to hear the first performance there of Afghanistan's national dance, the "Atan-i-Mili," since the Taliban silenced music five years earlier.
But only one elderly musician was found to play a double-sided Afghan drum called a dhol. There were no others to play the complex rhythmical counterpoints of the dance. And there was no one to play the traditional melody on the raspy, flute-like surnai. It was a sparse sound testifying to the state of music in southern Afghanistan immediately after Taliban rule.
Instead, militia fighters fired their AK-47s to the drumbeat in the way Western DJs use old records to perform "scratch" rhythms.
Within two years, after many Afghan musicians returned from lives as refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, the sound of a full group playing the Atan-i-Mili would be common in Afghanistan again.
Life today remains difficult and dangerous for Afghan musicians. An ethnic Turkmen singer named Quarab Nazar was gunned down recently along with six of his backing group after performing at a wedding party in northern Jowzjan Province. Police say the attackers were Taliban fighters. The Taliban also is blamed for other recent attacks against musicians in the south and east of the country.
Still, classical Afghan musicians want to breath life back into their heritage after decades of war and repression.
Read the full story, including photographs and audio clips, HERE.
(h/t Farhad)
By Country / Afghanistan
Afghanistan: Musicians Struggling To Revive Classical Heritage After Taliban
November 11, 2005
Decades of war and the Taliban's five-year ban on music took their toll on Afghan classical music. Musicians have been trying to resuscitate the art since the end of Taliban rule. But they face serious economic and artistic challenges -- including the threat of possible attack by Taliban fighters if they perform in provincial areas. Through interviews and field recordings, RFE/RL correspondent Ron Synovitz has documented attempts to revive Afghan music since the collapse of the Taliban regime nearly four years ago.
Kabul, 11 November 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Three warring Afghan militia factions in Wardak Province put their disputes aside long enough in early 2002 to celebrate a feast together in the district of Chak.
Hundreds gathered to hear the first performance there of Afghanistan's national dance, the "Atan-i-Mili," since the Taliban silenced music five years earlier.
But only one elderly musician was found to play a double-sided Afghan drum called a dhol. There were no others to play the complex rhythmical counterpoints of the dance. And there was no one to play the traditional melody on the raspy, flute-like surnai. It was a sparse sound testifying to the state of music in southern Afghanistan immediately after Taliban rule.
Instead, militia fighters fired their AK-47s to the drumbeat in the way Western DJs use old records to perform "scratch" rhythms.
Within two years, after many Afghan musicians returned from lives as refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, the sound of a full group playing the Atan-i-Mili would be common in Afghanistan again.
Life today remains difficult and dangerous for Afghan musicians. An ethnic Turkmen singer named Quarab Nazar was gunned down recently along with six of his backing group after performing at a wedding party in northern Jowzjan Province. Police say the attackers were Taliban fighters. The Taliban also is blamed for other recent attacks against musicians in the south and east of the country.
Still, classical Afghan musicians want to breath life back into their heritage after decades of war and repression.
Read the full story, including photographs and audio clips, HERE.
(h/t Farhad)
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Violence in Jamaican Dancehall Lyrics (LAT)
LAT
Jamaica music lyrics — trigger of violence?
The debate has intensified since lethal police raids in a slum that is the home turf of an alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in lyrics of a music called dancehall.
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
June 13, 2010
Reporting from Kingston, Jamaica —
Ova di wall, Ova di wall
Put yuh AK ova di wall…
Blood a go run
Like Dunns River Fall.
Blood flowing like waterfalls. Brains floating like feathers out of a torn pillow. Women submitting to the whims of neighborhood "dons."
The images are typical of dancehall, a popular Jamaican music style that has sparked a furious debate over whether it merely reflects an increasingly violent society or somehow contributes to the mayhem.
Some of dancehall's most popular performers, including Elephant Man, who wrote "Ova di Wall," use hyperviolent lyrics that chronicle the exploits of "badmanism," the cult of gun-toting gangs. Some are also criticized as misogynistic and anti-gay.
The national debate has intensified in the aftermath of lethal police raids last month in the Tivoli Gardens slum that is the home turf of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, the alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in dancehall lyrics.
Community leader Henley Morgan, a pastor who runs a social outreach program in the lower-class Trenchtown district where reggae legend Bob Marley grew up, worries that the extreme songs of dancehall, a successor to ska, rocksteady and reggae, could be "dictating the culture."
"This is music that is coming out of what we call garrisons, or ghettos that have been politicized. Violent dancehall has a lot of profanity, glorifies guns and degrades women," Morgan said. "Not all dancehall promotes violence, but it's the songs with raunchy lyrics that get played."
Youths interviewed recently seemed torn between their enjoyment of a genre that is perfect "jumping up," or dance, music and their aversion to the lyrics' often explicit messages.
"These are things the Jamaican middle class doesn't want to hear, but they happen in our society," said Adrian Demetrius, a 20-year-old telemarketer who was interviewed one Saturday night amid the din of a popular dance club here called Quad. "Dancehall is just bringing it to the mainstream."
As the music's influence has grown, Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission has tried to impose rules on radio stations to limit explicit language. But dancehall's enormous popularity has frustrated those efforts fueled competition among the island's radio stations to play the most outrageous tunes, said Donna Hope, a Jamaican music expert and professor at the University of the West Indies.
...........
Read the full story HERE.
Jamaica music lyrics — trigger of violence?
The debate has intensified since lethal police raids in a slum that is the home turf of an alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in lyrics of a music called dancehall.
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
June 13, 2010
Reporting from Kingston, Jamaica —
Ova di wall, Ova di wall
Put yuh AK ova di wall…
Blood a go run
Like Dunns River Fall.
Blood flowing like waterfalls. Brains floating like feathers out of a torn pillow. Women submitting to the whims of neighborhood "dons."
The images are typical of dancehall, a popular Jamaican music style that has sparked a furious debate over whether it merely reflects an increasingly violent society or somehow contributes to the mayhem.
Some of dancehall's most popular performers, including Elephant Man, who wrote "Ova di Wall," use hyperviolent lyrics that chronicle the exploits of "badmanism," the cult of gun-toting gangs. Some are also criticized as misogynistic and anti-gay.
The national debate has intensified in the aftermath of lethal police raids last month in the Tivoli Gardens slum that is the home turf of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, the alleged drugs and arms trafficker whose violent lifestyle is glorified in dancehall lyrics.
Community leader Henley Morgan, a pastor who runs a social outreach program in the lower-class Trenchtown district where reggae legend Bob Marley grew up, worries that the extreme songs of dancehall, a successor to ska, rocksteady and reggae, could be "dictating the culture."
"This is music that is coming out of what we call garrisons, or ghettos that have been politicized. Violent dancehall has a lot of profanity, glorifies guns and degrades women," Morgan said. "Not all dancehall promotes violence, but it's the songs with raunchy lyrics that get played."
Youths interviewed recently seemed torn between their enjoyment of a genre that is perfect "jumping up," or dance, music and their aversion to the lyrics' often explicit messages.
"These are things the Jamaican middle class doesn't want to hear, but they happen in our society," said Adrian Demetrius, a 20-year-old telemarketer who was interviewed one Saturday night amid the din of a popular dance club here called Quad. "Dancehall is just bringing it to the mainstream."
As the music's influence has grown, Jamaica's Broadcasting Commission has tried to impose rules on radio stations to limit explicit language. But dancehall's enormous popularity has frustrated those efforts fueled competition among the island's radio stations to play the most outrageous tunes, said Donna Hope, a Jamaican music expert and professor at the University of the West Indies.
...........
Read the full story HERE.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Wendy's pulls free CD over Donna Summer lyrics
Racy lyrics lead Wendy's to pull CD from kid meals
June 12, 2010
updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago
ATLANTA — The fast food-chain Wendy's has pulled a disco CD included in kids' meals because of racy lyrics in one of the songs.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of the songs on the Disco Fever CD was Donna Summer's "Last Dance." The song has two sets of lyrics. One version includes the words "so bad." But some heard the alternative lyrics "so horny" on the CD, which had been marked as safe for 3 years old and up.
The Atlanta-based chain announced on its website Saturday that it would continue to put three other CDs in the kids' meals. Those CDs include the songs "ABC" by Jackson 5 and "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang. The website said Wendy's is "no longer offering" the Disco Fever CD but doesn't mention the reason.
A reader sent this related video suggestion from Newsy.com [thanks!]:
pp
June 12, 2010
updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago
ATLANTA — The fast food-chain Wendy's has pulled a disco CD included in kids' meals because of racy lyrics in one of the songs.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of the songs on the Disco Fever CD was Donna Summer's "Last Dance." The song has two sets of lyrics. One version includes the words "so bad." But some heard the alternative lyrics "so horny" on the CD, which had been marked as safe for 3 years old and up.
The Atlanta-based chain announced on its website Saturday that it would continue to put three other CDs in the kids' meals. Those CDs include the songs "ABC" by Jackson 5 and "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang. The website said Wendy's is "no longer offering" the Disco Fever CD but doesn't mention the reason.
A reader sent this related video suggestion from Newsy.com [thanks!]:
pp
Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Hardline Somali Militants Ban Music on Radio
NYT
April 13, 2010
Somali Radio Stations Halt Music
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM
MOGADISHU, Somalia — At least 14 radio stations here in the capital stopped broadcasting music on Tuesday, heeding an ultimatum by an Islamist insurgent group to stop playing songs or face “serious consequences.”
The threat left radio stations scrambling to scrub even the briefest suggestion of music from their daily programming. “Bam! Bam! Bam!” — the sound of gunshots that Somalis in Mogadishu have grown accustomed to hearing — was played by Radio Shabelle on its news broadcast to replace the music it usually uses to introduce the segment.
Similarly odd sounds — like the roar of an engine, a car horn, animal noises and the sound of water flowing — were used to introduce programs on some of the other radio stations that stopped playing music.
“We have replaced the music of the early morning program with the sound of the rooster, replaced the news music with the sound of the firing bullet and the music of the night program with the sound of running horses,” said Osman Abdullahi Gure, the director of Radio Shabelle radio and television, one of the most influential stations in Mogadishu.
“It was really a crush,” he said. “We haven’t had time to replace all the programs at one time; instead, we have chosen these sounds.”
The insurgent group, Hizbul Islam, issued its ultimatum 10 days ago and set Tuesday as the deadline to comply, saying that music was “un-Islamic.” In other parts of the country, insurgents have taken over or shut down some radio stations. Last week, the Shabab, the country’s most powerful insurgent group, said it was banning foreign programs like those broadcast by the BBC and Voice of America, calling them Western propaganda that violated Islam.
The radio stations that stopped playing music on Tuesday are based in both insurgent and government-controlled areas of the ruined capital. Those located in insurgent-held territory seemed to have little alternative, but some of the managers at stations in government-controlled territory argued that the lack of security and the loss of advertising income led them to comply as well.
Somalia, crippled by years of unrest and the lack of a powerful central government, is one of the most dangerous countries to be a journalist.
“Mogadishu media has become a defenseless victim that is exposed to all sorts of oppression, abuse and brutality,” said Omar Faruk Osman, the secretary general of the National Union of Somali Journalists, in a statement published on the group’s Web site. Nine journalists were killed in 2009 in Somalia, according to a report published on the site.
The transitional government, which has been weakened by constant attacks, roadside bombs and suicide bombers, controls only a few enclaves of Mogadishu with the support of the African Union peacekeepers.
“The government cannot guarantee our security, and we have to make our first priority the safety and security of our employees,” said Abdirashid Abdulle, director of the newly established radio station Tusmo, which is based in Hamarjajab, a government-controlled area.
Many residents expressed dismay at the new restrictions. “We are really losing all hope of life,” said Hashi Abdullahi, who said he liked to listen to music. The insurgents have “punished our life with bullets, and today they are punishing us with a ban on all types of music,” he said.
Many also worried about getting accurate and balanced news after learning that the radio stations followed the orders of the insurgent groups.
“I think that this was a test to terrorize the media in Mogadishu, and it’s seems like a justification to confiscate the radio stations that fail to comply with the order in the areas under their control,” said Ugaas Mohamed Bashir, vice chairman of the Somali Traditional Elders Council.
At least two radio stations did not heed the ban. The government-owned Radio Mogadishu and another station, Radio Bar-Kulan, which is mostly produced in Kenya, continued playing music.
AP/SD UT
Hardline Somali militants ban music on airwaves
By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN and MOHAMED SHEIKH NOR, Associated Press Writers
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 9:23 a.m.
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Rock, rap and love songs once filled the airwaves in Somalia's war-torn capital, one of the few pleasures residents had. But Islamist militants ordered music off the air Tuesday, labeling it un-Islamic in a hardline edict reminiscent of the Taliban.
Stations immediately complied, fearful that disc jockeys would face the harsh punishment militants mete out here: amputations and stonings. The edict is the latest unpopular order from the Islamists, who also have banned bras, musical ringtones and movies.
More than a dozen radio stations complied with the order by the militant group Hizbul Islam, the National Union of Somali Journalists said.
"Journalists working in these stations have in the past witnessed broad daylight assassination of their colleagues and have now been signaled that they would follow the same fate if they do not obey these oppressive orders," said the union's secretary-general, Omar Faruk Osman.
Somalia has a tradition of music and most residents greeted the ban with dismay. Rock, rap and love songs from the U.S., Europe and Africa could be heard on Somali stations before the ban.
"Now I think we are going to be forced to hear only the horrific sounds of the gunfire and the explosions," said Khadiya Omar, a 22-year-old Mogadishu resident who called music a "tranquilizer" to help him forget life's troubles.
Somalis in the country's capital can still listen to music on two stations: one that the government controls and another that is funded by the United Nations. Both stations are based in the small area of Mogadishu under the control of government and African Union forces. Similar edicts have been imposed on stations in the southern Somali regions held by the Islamist group al-Shabab.
Somalia has not had an effective government for 19 years. Thousands of civilians have died in violence-wracked Mogadishu in a conflict that has intensified the last three years and the U.N. estimates some 100,000 people have been displaced in the capital this year alone.
Islamic insurgents control much of Mogadishu and have been trying to topple the country's fragile, U.N.-backed government.
The music ban went into effect one day after fighting between the Somali government and Islamist insurgents killed 21 people in Mogadishu.
"We are in a war-ravaged country and music is what brings us relief from anger, frustration, depression, fatigue and other emotional and physical pain," said Isaq Ali, a Mogadishu resident.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden, said Tuesday he was worried about the plight of civilians in the capital, the principal victims of the fighting. In March, more than 30 civilians were killed and 900 wounded in fighting, Bowden said. More than 100 of the injuries were children under age 5.
The deputy chairman of the Somali Foreign Correspondents Association, Mohamed Ibrahim Nur, condemned the music ban and called for Hizbul Islam to retract the order.
"This will paralyze the already violence-affected media in Somalia and will deprive Somalis from getting independent information free from threat, censorship and imposition of radical addicts," he said.
Any station that defies the order could face severe punishments. The Islamists frequently assassinate those who defy them or carry out punishments like amputations. Abdulahi Yasin Jama at Tusmo broadcasting said that stations have no choice but to comply.
"We had no other option but to stop playing music. Now that we have dropped music we may lose listeners. If we ignore the warning we have to face the wrath of the militants," said one of Mogadishu's radio directors, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal attacks.
The director noted that the station also would have to re-record all of its commercials that contain music.
The order to stop the music echoes the Taliban's strict social rules imposed on Afghans beginning in the late 1990s. The Taliban banned music and movies and didn't allow women to leave their homes without an escort by a male family member.
The ban on music means that even talk-radio stations will have to make changes. Jama, from the independent broadcaster, said his station would have to stop using music as a bridge between programs.
"We are using other sounds, such as gunfire, the noise of vehicles and birds to link up our programs and news," he said.
April 13, 2010
Somali Radio Stations Halt Music
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM
MOGADISHU, Somalia — At least 14 radio stations here in the capital stopped broadcasting music on Tuesday, heeding an ultimatum by an Islamist insurgent group to stop playing songs or face “serious consequences.”
The threat left radio stations scrambling to scrub even the briefest suggestion of music from their daily programming. “Bam! Bam! Bam!” — the sound of gunshots that Somalis in Mogadishu have grown accustomed to hearing — was played by Radio Shabelle on its news broadcast to replace the music it usually uses to introduce the segment.
Similarly odd sounds — like the roar of an engine, a car horn, animal noises and the sound of water flowing — were used to introduce programs on some of the other radio stations that stopped playing music.
“We have replaced the music of the early morning program with the sound of the rooster, replaced the news music with the sound of the firing bullet and the music of the night program with the sound of running horses,” said Osman Abdullahi Gure, the director of Radio Shabelle radio and television, one of the most influential stations in Mogadishu.
“It was really a crush,” he said. “We haven’t had time to replace all the programs at one time; instead, we have chosen these sounds.”
The insurgent group, Hizbul Islam, issued its ultimatum 10 days ago and set Tuesday as the deadline to comply, saying that music was “un-Islamic.” In other parts of the country, insurgents have taken over or shut down some radio stations. Last week, the Shabab, the country’s most powerful insurgent group, said it was banning foreign programs like those broadcast by the BBC and Voice of America, calling them Western propaganda that violated Islam.
The radio stations that stopped playing music on Tuesday are based in both insurgent and government-controlled areas of the ruined capital. Those located in insurgent-held territory seemed to have little alternative, but some of the managers at stations in government-controlled territory argued that the lack of security and the loss of advertising income led them to comply as well.
Somalia, crippled by years of unrest and the lack of a powerful central government, is one of the most dangerous countries to be a journalist.
“Mogadishu media has become a defenseless victim that is exposed to all sorts of oppression, abuse and brutality,” said Omar Faruk Osman, the secretary general of the National Union of Somali Journalists, in a statement published on the group’s Web site. Nine journalists were killed in 2009 in Somalia, according to a report published on the site.
The transitional government, which has been weakened by constant attacks, roadside bombs and suicide bombers, controls only a few enclaves of Mogadishu with the support of the African Union peacekeepers.
“The government cannot guarantee our security, and we have to make our first priority the safety and security of our employees,” said Abdirashid Abdulle, director of the newly established radio station Tusmo, which is based in Hamarjajab, a government-controlled area.
Many residents expressed dismay at the new restrictions. “We are really losing all hope of life,” said Hashi Abdullahi, who said he liked to listen to music. The insurgents have “punished our life with bullets, and today they are punishing us with a ban on all types of music,” he said.
Many also worried about getting accurate and balanced news after learning that the radio stations followed the orders of the insurgent groups.
“I think that this was a test to terrorize the media in Mogadishu, and it’s seems like a justification to confiscate the radio stations that fail to comply with the order in the areas under their control,” said Ugaas Mohamed Bashir, vice chairman of the Somali Traditional Elders Council.
At least two radio stations did not heed the ban. The government-owned Radio Mogadishu and another station, Radio Bar-Kulan, which is mostly produced in Kenya, continued playing music.
AP/SD UT
Hardline Somali militants ban music on airwaves
By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN and MOHAMED SHEIKH NOR, Associated Press Writers
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 9:23 a.m.
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Rock, rap and love songs once filled the airwaves in Somalia's war-torn capital, one of the few pleasures residents had. But Islamist militants ordered music off the air Tuesday, labeling it un-Islamic in a hardline edict reminiscent of the Taliban.
Stations immediately complied, fearful that disc jockeys would face the harsh punishment militants mete out here: amputations and stonings. The edict is the latest unpopular order from the Islamists, who also have banned bras, musical ringtones and movies.
More than a dozen radio stations complied with the order by the militant group Hizbul Islam, the National Union of Somali Journalists said.
"Journalists working in these stations have in the past witnessed broad daylight assassination of their colleagues and have now been signaled that they would follow the same fate if they do not obey these oppressive orders," said the union's secretary-general, Omar Faruk Osman.
Somalia has a tradition of music and most residents greeted the ban with dismay. Rock, rap and love songs from the U.S., Europe and Africa could be heard on Somali stations before the ban.
"Now I think we are going to be forced to hear only the horrific sounds of the gunfire and the explosions," said Khadiya Omar, a 22-year-old Mogadishu resident who called music a "tranquilizer" to help him forget life's troubles.
Somalis in the country's capital can still listen to music on two stations: one that the government controls and another that is funded by the United Nations. Both stations are based in the small area of Mogadishu under the control of government and African Union forces. Similar edicts have been imposed on stations in the southern Somali regions held by the Islamist group al-Shabab.
Somalia has not had an effective government for 19 years. Thousands of civilians have died in violence-wracked Mogadishu in a conflict that has intensified the last three years and the U.N. estimates some 100,000 people have been displaced in the capital this year alone.
Islamic insurgents control much of Mogadishu and have been trying to topple the country's fragile, U.N.-backed government.
The music ban went into effect one day after fighting between the Somali government and Islamist insurgents killed 21 people in Mogadishu.
"We are in a war-ravaged country and music is what brings us relief from anger, frustration, depression, fatigue and other emotional and physical pain," said Isaq Ali, a Mogadishu resident.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden, said Tuesday he was worried about the plight of civilians in the capital, the principal victims of the fighting. In March, more than 30 civilians were killed and 900 wounded in fighting, Bowden said. More than 100 of the injuries were children under age 5.
The deputy chairman of the Somali Foreign Correspondents Association, Mohamed Ibrahim Nur, condemned the music ban and called for Hizbul Islam to retract the order.
"This will paralyze the already violence-affected media in Somalia and will deprive Somalis from getting independent information free from threat, censorship and imposition of radical addicts," he said.
Any station that defies the order could face severe punishments. The Islamists frequently assassinate those who defy them or carry out punishments like amputations. Abdulahi Yasin Jama at Tusmo broadcasting said that stations have no choice but to comply.
"We had no other option but to stop playing music. Now that we have dropped music we may lose listeners. If we ignore the warning we have to face the wrath of the militants," said one of Mogadishu's radio directors, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal attacks.
The director noted that the station also would have to re-record all of its commercials that contain music.
The order to stop the music echoes the Taliban's strict social rules imposed on Afghans beginning in the late 1990s. The Taliban banned music and movies and didn't allow women to leave their homes without an escort by a male family member.
The ban on music means that even talk-radio stations will have to make changes. Jama, from the independent broadcaster, said his station would have to stop using music as a bridge between programs.
"We are using other sounds, such as gunfire, the noise of vehicles and birds to link up our programs and news," he said.
Friday, March 26, 2010
NYT: Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows
NYT
March 25, 2010
Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
YANGON, Myanmar — The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.
“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.
Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.
Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.
Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here.
U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional “spirit dances” with something resembling techno music, said he believed that the government tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control. “You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release,” he said.
“We live in fear,” he said. “We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy.”
The success of artists like Mr. Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar’s often monochromatic image as a place of zero freedoms. This country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place — human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.
But even if the generals willed it, people here say, the government would probably not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society here is too unruly, disorganized and corrupt; people are too creative, the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.
The police are famously brutal, but they, too, suffer from tropical torpor: a common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.
Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country’s largest cities.
The government has nurtured the creation of a soccer league after years without any organized matches. Soccer games are famously raucous, with fans spewing invective toward the opposing side, ignoring government exhortations to be “polite.”
The number of FM radio stations in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has gone from just one a few years ago to a handful that play both Burmese and Western-style music. Last year, a private company started up the country’s first television channel dedicated to music videos.
“The government is trying to distract people from politics,” said a Western-educated Burmese businessman who declined to be identified because he thought it might jeopardize his business. “There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.”
The contrast between the military government’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and the surprisingly uninhibited entertainment scene can be jarring.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Read the full story (with photos and video) HERE.
March 25, 2010
Despite Authoritarian Rule, Myanmar Art Grows
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
YANGON, Myanmar — The dance music thundered through a crowd of thousands of drunken fans, past the pavilions where skinny women in impossibly high heels gyrated around metal poles and into the streets filled with taxis that ferried partygoers to this free, whiskey-soaked concert in the park.
“Our parents don’t allow it, but we do it anyway,” said Zun Pwint Phyu, one of the dancers who endured hours of lascivious stares.
Myanmar is a country where owning a fax machine without a permit is illegal, where even spontaneous gatherings of more than five people are technically banned and where critics of the government are regularly locked away for decades in tiny prison cells.
Yet despite this repression, or perhaps partly because of it, young people here are pushing the limits of what the military government, let alone their parents, considers acceptable art and entertainment.
Art exhibitions, some featuring risky hidden political messages, open nearly every week in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. Yangon has a festival of underground music, including punk bands, twice a year. Fans of the most popular musical genres, hip-hop and electronic dance music, wear low-slung baggy pants to regularly held concerts here.
U Thxa Soe, a popular artist who mixes traditional “spirit dances” with something resembling techno music, said he believed that the government tolerated wild concerts in recent years partly because it suited its strategy of control. “You need to squeeze and release, squeeze and release,” he said.
“We live in fear,” he said. “We live under a dictatorship. People need fresh air. They release their anger, their energy.”
The success of artists like Mr. Thxa Soe undermines Myanmar’s often monochromatic image as a place of zero freedoms. This country, formerly known as Burma, is by many measures a brutally authoritarian place — human rights groups count 2,100 political prisoners.
But even if the generals willed it, people here say, the government would probably not be able to pull off North Korean-style totalitarianism. Society here is too unruly, disorganized and corrupt; people are too creative, the climate too hot for 24-hour repression.
The police are famously brutal, but they, too, suffer from tropical torpor: a common scene is a group of police officers napping in the back of a truck.
Over the past two years, entertainment options have rapidly expanded for residents of the country’s largest cities.
The government has nurtured the creation of a soccer league after years without any organized matches. Soccer games are famously raucous, with fans spewing invective toward the opposing side, ignoring government exhortations to be “polite.”
The number of FM radio stations in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has gone from just one a few years ago to a handful that play both Burmese and Western-style music. Last year, a private company started up the country’s first television channel dedicated to music videos.
“The government is trying to distract people from politics,” said a Western-educated Burmese businessman who declined to be identified because he thought it might jeopardize his business. “There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.”
The contrast between the military government’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and the surprisingly uninhibited entertainment scene can be jarring.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Read the full story (with photos and video) HERE.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Meet Han Han, the World's Most Popular Blogger
NYT
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Front Yard Snow Sculpture Venus de Milo Ordered Covered Up
Would a marble bust of Venus de Milo in front of a mansion get that treatment? Nah. But apparently her snow breasts were too much for this neighborhood.
Full story from HUFFPO, but the photo says it all.
Full story from HUFFPO, but the photo says it all.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Mexican ruling party proposes prison time for drug ballad singers
Canadian Press
Mexican ruling party proposes prison time for drug ballad singers
By Catherine E. Shoichet (CP) – 4 days ago
MEXICO CITY — A new proposal from Mexico's ruling party could send musicians to prison for performing songs that glorify drug trafficking.
The law would bring prison sentences of up to three years for people who perform or produce songs or movies glamorizing criminals. "Society sees drug ballads as nice, pleasant, inconsequential and harmless, but they are the opposite," National Action Party lawmaker Oscar Martin Arce told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The ballads, known as "narcocorridos," often describe drug trafficking and violence, and are popular among some norteno bands. After some killings, gangs pipe narcocorridos into police radio scanners, along with threatening messages.
Martin said his party's proposal, presented before Congress on Wednesday, also takes aim at low-budget movies praising drug lords. It was unclear when lawmakers would vote on it.
"We cannot accept it as normal. We cannot exalt these people because they themselves are distributing these materials among youths to lead them into a lifestyle where the bad guy wins," he said.
Martin said the proposal's intention is not to limit free expression, but to stop such performances from inciting crimes.
But Elijah Wald, author of the book, "Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas," said politicians are attempting to censor artists rather than attacking Mexico's real problems.
On his Web site, Wald has posted descriptions of dozens of past efforts to stop the songs, including radio broadcast bans and politicians' proposals.
"It is very hard to stop the drug trafficking," he said. "It is very easy to get your name in the papers by attacking famous musicians."
The norteno band Los Tigres del Norte cancelled their planned appearance at an awards ceremony at a government-owned auditorium in October after organizers allegedly asked the group not to perform their latest drug ballad.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide crackdown on drug cartels in late 2006, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police across Mexico.
Even performers who don't sing drug ballads have been caught up in recent raids.
In December Mexican authorities arrested Latin Grammy winner Ramon Ayala at a drug cartel's party in a gated community of mansions outside the central mountain town of Tepoztlan.
Ayala's attorney has said the accordionist and his band, Los Bravos del Norte, did not know their clients were suspected members of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
.....
Read the full article HERE.
Associated Press Writer Carlos Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Mexican ruling party proposes prison time for drug ballad singers
By Catherine E. Shoichet (CP) – 4 days ago
MEXICO CITY — A new proposal from Mexico's ruling party could send musicians to prison for performing songs that glorify drug trafficking.
The law would bring prison sentences of up to three years for people who perform or produce songs or movies glamorizing criminals. "Society sees drug ballads as nice, pleasant, inconsequential and harmless, but they are the opposite," National Action Party lawmaker Oscar Martin Arce told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The ballads, known as "narcocorridos," often describe drug trafficking and violence, and are popular among some norteno bands. After some killings, gangs pipe narcocorridos into police radio scanners, along with threatening messages.
Martin said his party's proposal, presented before Congress on Wednesday, also takes aim at low-budget movies praising drug lords. It was unclear when lawmakers would vote on it.
"We cannot accept it as normal. We cannot exalt these people because they themselves are distributing these materials among youths to lead them into a lifestyle where the bad guy wins," he said.
Martin said the proposal's intention is not to limit free expression, but to stop such performances from inciting crimes.
But Elijah Wald, author of the book, "Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas," said politicians are attempting to censor artists rather than attacking Mexico's real problems.
On his Web site, Wald has posted descriptions of dozens of past efforts to stop the songs, including radio broadcast bans and politicians' proposals.
"It is very hard to stop the drug trafficking," he said. "It is very easy to get your name in the papers by attacking famous musicians."
The norteno band Los Tigres del Norte cancelled their planned appearance at an awards ceremony at a government-owned auditorium in October after organizers allegedly asked the group not to perform their latest drug ballad.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a nationwide crackdown on drug cartels in late 2006, deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police across Mexico.
Even performers who don't sing drug ballads have been caught up in recent raids.
In December Mexican authorities arrested Latin Grammy winner Ramon Ayala at a drug cartel's party in a gated community of mansions outside the central mountain town of Tepoztlan.
Ayala's attorney has said the accordionist and his band, Los Bravos del Norte, did not know their clients were suspected members of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
.....
Read the full article HERE.
Associated Press Writer Carlos Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Iraqi musicians: murder and revival
Freemuse
NEWS
24 November 2008
Iraq:
Musicians take up their instruments again
50 musicians have been killed in 2004-2006 in Iraq, according to a national artists union. But as the civil war appears to be fading, so does the pressure on musicians and the ban on music by the Mehdi Army's and Al-Qaeda's militiamen, reported Sammy Ketz from Agence France Presse (AFP) on 17 November 2008.
In early 2006, the saxophone player Ayad Hair was was killed at his home in Sadr City by militiamen — in front of his children — and afterwards his corpse was burned. On the same day, his fellow musician, the tambourine player Ali Mohammad was killed. His corpse was found more than two years later. The militiamen explained to the musicians’ families that this will be the fate of all those “who transgress holy law.”
A 37-year-old music shop owner in the Fadel neighbourhood of central Baghdad, Mohammad Rashid, had his shop destroyed by a group of masked jihadists in March 2006, at a time when the Sunni extremist movement Al-Qaeda took over control of the neighbourhood — an area which was once famous for its traditional music groups, bands of drummers, trumpet and timpani players that would accompany a groom to his bride, cater to circumcision celebrations, and herald major holidays.
Mohammad Rashid reopened his shop during 2008, and then told the story about his band and the fate of his fellow musicians to Sammy Ketz from Agence France Presse, AFP. The trumpets and drum covers on display still bear the jagged scrapes left by the vandals, Sammy Ketz described in his article.
2004-2006: 50 musicians killed
“What you are doing is forbidden, because music is the work of the devil. If you reopen your shop, you are dead,” Mohammad Rashid remembers the assailants telling him before he fled to Syria..
The AFP-article quoted the head of Iraq’s artists union, Hussein al-Basri, as saying that in 2003, on the eve of the US-led invasion, there were more than 300 traditional bands playing in Baghdad, but most of them stopped playing in 2004, and since then around 50 musicians have been killed, and the number of active bands has dwindled to around 100.
Instruments destroyed
But even though Iraqi musicians are slowly returning to the streets of Baghdad, performing music is still a dangerous profession in some parts of Iraq.
In March 2008 an orchestral group that had travelled to the southern town of Aziziyya was reportedly attacked by the Mehdi Army, which destroyed their instruments.
In the Allawi district of central Baghdad, 27-year-old Ahmed Omar Magid, whose father played in the royal symphony orchestra in 1954, suffered the same treatment at the hands of Sunni fighters.
Sammy Ketz reported that today Ahmed Omar Magid and his bands perform at approximately a dozen weddings a month.
Ali Kassem, a 40-year-old musician who used to play trumpet in a military band, told the AFP-reporter that the miliamen would organise fake weddings in order to ambush the musicians when they arrived there to perform. He said that he had friends who were killed that way.
“And yet I am sure that nothing in the Koran forbids our art,” he told Sammy Ketz.
First metal concert in five years
In October 2008, Iraq’s first metal concert in five years was held in Baghdad, reported journalist Charles Levinson in the American newspaper USA Today, after he had experienced around 250 Iraqi fans of heavy metal music come out of hiding to listen to two heavy metal orchestras.
One of the two bands that performed at the concert was Brutal Impact. The 21-year-old lead singer of the band, Mani, told USA Today’s reporter in an interview after the show: “When religious extremists controlled Baghdad’s neighbourhoods, being a member of heavy metal’s unique subculture could amount to a death sentence. If I wore a T-shirt like this one,” Mani said, pointing to a logo of a bleeding skull, “they'd have killed me.”
The second band that performed that night was Dog Faced Corpse.
Click on map to read more about Iraq on freemuse.org
Between 2004 and 2006, around 50 musicians in Iraq have been killed, according to the head of the country’s artists union
Sources
AFP – 11 November 2008:
'Music returns to Baghdad as vice squad enforcers retreat'
Daily Star / AFP – 17 November 2008:
‘Music returns to streets of Baghdad as both Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists recede’
USA Today – 30 October 2008:
'Nothing else matters: Iraqi heavy metal returns'
NEWS
24 November 2008
Iraq:
Musicians take up their instruments again
50 musicians have been killed in 2004-2006 in Iraq, according to a national artists union. But as the civil war appears to be fading, so does the pressure on musicians and the ban on music by the Mehdi Army's and Al-Qaeda's militiamen, reported Sammy Ketz from Agence France Presse (AFP) on 17 November 2008.
In early 2006, the saxophone player Ayad Hair was was killed at his home in Sadr City by militiamen — in front of his children — and afterwards his corpse was burned. On the same day, his fellow musician, the tambourine player Ali Mohammad was killed. His corpse was found more than two years later. The militiamen explained to the musicians’ families that this will be the fate of all those “who transgress holy law.”
A 37-year-old music shop owner in the Fadel neighbourhood of central Baghdad, Mohammad Rashid, had his shop destroyed by a group of masked jihadists in March 2006, at a time when the Sunni extremist movement Al-Qaeda took over control of the neighbourhood — an area which was once famous for its traditional music groups, bands of drummers, trumpet and timpani players that would accompany a groom to his bride, cater to circumcision celebrations, and herald major holidays.
Mohammad Rashid reopened his shop during 2008, and then told the story about his band and the fate of his fellow musicians to Sammy Ketz from Agence France Presse, AFP. The trumpets and drum covers on display still bear the jagged scrapes left by the vandals, Sammy Ketz described in his article.
2004-2006: 50 musicians killed
“What you are doing is forbidden, because music is the work of the devil. If you reopen your shop, you are dead,” Mohammad Rashid remembers the assailants telling him before he fled to Syria..
The AFP-article quoted the head of Iraq’s artists union, Hussein al-Basri, as saying that in 2003, on the eve of the US-led invasion, there were more than 300 traditional bands playing in Baghdad, but most of them stopped playing in 2004, and since then around 50 musicians have been killed, and the number of active bands has dwindled to around 100.
Instruments destroyed
But even though Iraqi musicians are slowly returning to the streets of Baghdad, performing music is still a dangerous profession in some parts of Iraq.
In March 2008 an orchestral group that had travelled to the southern town of Aziziyya was reportedly attacked by the Mehdi Army, which destroyed their instruments.
In the Allawi district of central Baghdad, 27-year-old Ahmed Omar Magid, whose father played in the royal symphony orchestra in 1954, suffered the same treatment at the hands of Sunni fighters.
Sammy Ketz reported that today Ahmed Omar Magid and his bands perform at approximately a dozen weddings a month.
Ali Kassem, a 40-year-old musician who used to play trumpet in a military band, told the AFP-reporter that the miliamen would organise fake weddings in order to ambush the musicians when they arrived there to perform. He said that he had friends who were killed that way.
“And yet I am sure that nothing in the Koran forbids our art,” he told Sammy Ketz.
First metal concert in five years
In October 2008, Iraq’s first metal concert in five years was held in Baghdad, reported journalist Charles Levinson in the American newspaper USA Today, after he had experienced around 250 Iraqi fans of heavy metal music come out of hiding to listen to two heavy metal orchestras.
One of the two bands that performed at the concert was Brutal Impact. The 21-year-old lead singer of the band, Mani, told USA Today’s reporter in an interview after the show: “When religious extremists controlled Baghdad’s neighbourhoods, being a member of heavy metal’s unique subculture could amount to a death sentence. If I wore a T-shirt like this one,” Mani said, pointing to a logo of a bleeding skull, “they'd have killed me.”
The second band that performed that night was Dog Faced Corpse.
Click on map to read more about Iraq on freemuse.org
Between 2004 and 2006, around 50 musicians in Iraq have been killed, according to the head of the country’s artists union
Sources
AFP – 11 November 2008:
'Music returns to Baghdad as vice squad enforcers retreat'
Daily Star / AFP – 17 November 2008:
‘Music returns to streets of Baghdad as both Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists recede’
USA Today – 30 October 2008:
'Nothing else matters: Iraqi heavy metal returns'
Sunday, October 12, 2008
U.S. Refuge for Pakistani Singer Fleeing the Taliban
NYT
October 13, 2008
U.S. Refuge for Singer Fleeing the Taliban
By BEN SISARIO
The threats started about a year ago, telling Haroon Bacha to stop singing or else.
“There were letters, there were phone calls, there were text messages,” Mr. Bacha said, sitting upright on a floor in Brooklyn, surrounded by smoke from Pakistani cigarettes. “They used to come very frequently back home, just telling me to stop music, or else I would be killed and my family would be. ...”
He trailed off, tears welling in his eyes. Mr. Bacha, 36, is a Pashtun, the Muslim ethnic group of the mountainous northwest of Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, and at home he is a star, with dozens of albums, slick videos and regular television appearances. In a sweet high baritone, he sings of peace, tolerance and resistance to war. Those liberal themes have endeared him to his war-weary Pashtun fans, he says, but made him a target of the local Taliban, which has been waging an escalating campaign against music and popular culture, calling it un-Islamic.
Two months ago Mr. Bacha escaped from his home near Peshawar, in Pakistan, and came to New York, leaving behind his wife, two young children and an extended family. If he goes back, he said, he will be killed. With a sharply reduced audience in the United States, Mr. Bacha faces an uncertain career, but on Saturday he sang at a small but lively benefit concert in Queens, organized by the Pashtun immigrants who have adopted him and held at an unlikely place: the Forest Hills Jewish Center.
“Anybody who is hated by the Taliban is starting out with a check in my column,” said Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, the leader of the center, a Conservative synagogue. Rabbi Skolnik said that an initial phone call from one of the organizers had “raised a red flag,” but that after the groups were vetted to make sure none of the money raised would go to terrorist groups, he was happy to rent the space.
In the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the Taliban has intimidated musicians and record store proprietors; recently dozens of music shops have been bombed, reportedly by pro-Taliban militants.
“Cultural activities are badly affected by what’s going on in the region,” said Hasan Khan, news director of the Islamabad-based television channel Khyber News, in a recent phone interview. “We have lost everything. We have lost music, we have lost local games, we have lost children playing in the street. It is almost impossible to visualize what is happening there.”
The soft-spoken Mr. Bacha, who has striking green eyes and short brown curls, is a slightly unusual figure as a Pashtun star; he has a university education and, unlike most Pashtun singers, he does not come from a family of musicians. He said he saw his role as helping to lead a broad cultural resistance to Islamic fundamentalism.
“These people are bringing Pashtuns a very bad name,” said Mr. Bacha, at one of the apartments in Brooklyn where he has been a guest. “The reason I didn’t succumb to these threats is that I should work for my people, for Pashto as a language and rich tradition. I need to promote it and show to the world that we are not like these people.”
Before the concert, held in the Jewish Center’s mirror-lined basement ballroom, Mr. Bacha led evening prayers, facing Mecca in the small lobby. And once the audience of 300 or so had taken its seats — the event was far from sold out — Mr. Bacha began performing, accompanied by two musicians and pumping a harmonium as he sang.
In the first songs of the night he declared his love for the Pashtuns’ land and traditional lifestyle: “Our mud houses are like palaces to us.” But soon his lyrics, which are drawn from old and new Pashto poetry, turned to topical struggles. “This is not my gun/This is not our war,” he sang, “They are bringing it to us.” The small crowd roared and clapped along, as men danced and threw money on the stage, in a sign of praise and approval.
“We are a peace-loving nation,” said Reyaz Nadi, 44, a Long Island architect originally from Kabul, the Afghan capital. “Unfortunately there’s always a war from the outside, going back to Alexander the Great. America is only the latest one.”
There is a historical precedent for the Taliban’s cultural clampdown. After taking power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it banned public performances of most forms of music — some religious chants were permitted — and symbolically hanged musical instruments in effigy. Many musicians went into exile in Pakistan, but since the American invasion of Afghanistan and establishment of a new government there, most have returned, said John Baily, an ethnomusicologist and Afghanistan specialist at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Professor Baily said it was not clear whether the same pattern was unfolding in Pakistan. “This is a very musical country with a huge range of different music,” he said. “It’s not that easy just to ban music. But they’re doing what they can.”
Mr. Bacha said he was not hopeful about his homeland’s future.
“If it continues like this, and these fanatics get power, our social fabric, our institutions — everything will be destroyed,” he said. “I don’t know what these elements want to have in their lives, what their world would be like.”
In the way of many musicians who come to New York who were accustomed to be big fish in smaller musical ponds, Mr. Bacha is adjusting to diminished prospects. Last week in New Jersey, for example, he played a wedding, something that his associates say he would never have done back home. On Saturday he will play at St. Michael’s Rectory in Bedford, Mass., and on Oct. 24 he will perform again in New York, at the Adria Hotel in Bayside, Queens.
“Wherever I find Pashtuns I can live as a singer,” Mr. Bacha said. “It could be America. It could be any part of the world.”
October 13, 2008
U.S. Refuge for Singer Fleeing the Taliban
By BEN SISARIO
The threats started about a year ago, telling Haroon Bacha to stop singing or else.
“There were letters, there were phone calls, there were text messages,” Mr. Bacha said, sitting upright on a floor in Brooklyn, surrounded by smoke from Pakistani cigarettes. “They used to come very frequently back home, just telling me to stop music, or else I would be killed and my family would be. ...”
He trailed off, tears welling in his eyes. Mr. Bacha, 36, is a Pashtun, the Muslim ethnic group of the mountainous northwest of Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, and at home he is a star, with dozens of albums, slick videos and regular television appearances. In a sweet high baritone, he sings of peace, tolerance and resistance to war. Those liberal themes have endeared him to his war-weary Pashtun fans, he says, but made him a target of the local Taliban, which has been waging an escalating campaign against music and popular culture, calling it un-Islamic.
Two months ago Mr. Bacha escaped from his home near Peshawar, in Pakistan, and came to New York, leaving behind his wife, two young children and an extended family. If he goes back, he said, he will be killed. With a sharply reduced audience in the United States, Mr. Bacha faces an uncertain career, but on Saturday he sang at a small but lively benefit concert in Queens, organized by the Pashtun immigrants who have adopted him and held at an unlikely place: the Forest Hills Jewish Center.
“Anybody who is hated by the Taliban is starting out with a check in my column,” said Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, the leader of the center, a Conservative synagogue. Rabbi Skolnik said that an initial phone call from one of the organizers had “raised a red flag,” but that after the groups were vetted to make sure none of the money raised would go to terrorist groups, he was happy to rent the space.
In the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the Taliban has intimidated musicians and record store proprietors; recently dozens of music shops have been bombed, reportedly by pro-Taliban militants.
“Cultural activities are badly affected by what’s going on in the region,” said Hasan Khan, news director of the Islamabad-based television channel Khyber News, in a recent phone interview. “We have lost everything. We have lost music, we have lost local games, we have lost children playing in the street. It is almost impossible to visualize what is happening there.”
The soft-spoken Mr. Bacha, who has striking green eyes and short brown curls, is a slightly unusual figure as a Pashtun star; he has a university education and, unlike most Pashtun singers, he does not come from a family of musicians. He said he saw his role as helping to lead a broad cultural resistance to Islamic fundamentalism.
“These people are bringing Pashtuns a very bad name,” said Mr. Bacha, at one of the apartments in Brooklyn where he has been a guest. “The reason I didn’t succumb to these threats is that I should work for my people, for Pashto as a language and rich tradition. I need to promote it and show to the world that we are not like these people.”
Before the concert, held in the Jewish Center’s mirror-lined basement ballroom, Mr. Bacha led evening prayers, facing Mecca in the small lobby. And once the audience of 300 or so had taken its seats — the event was far from sold out — Mr. Bacha began performing, accompanied by two musicians and pumping a harmonium as he sang.
In the first songs of the night he declared his love for the Pashtuns’ land and traditional lifestyle: “Our mud houses are like palaces to us.” But soon his lyrics, which are drawn from old and new Pashto poetry, turned to topical struggles. “This is not my gun/This is not our war,” he sang, “They are bringing it to us.” The small crowd roared and clapped along, as men danced and threw money on the stage, in a sign of praise and approval.
“We are a peace-loving nation,” said Reyaz Nadi, 44, a Long Island architect originally from Kabul, the Afghan capital. “Unfortunately there’s always a war from the outside, going back to Alexander the Great. America is only the latest one.”
There is a historical precedent for the Taliban’s cultural clampdown. After taking power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it banned public performances of most forms of music — some religious chants were permitted — and symbolically hanged musical instruments in effigy. Many musicians went into exile in Pakistan, but since the American invasion of Afghanistan and establishment of a new government there, most have returned, said John Baily, an ethnomusicologist and Afghanistan specialist at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Professor Baily said it was not clear whether the same pattern was unfolding in Pakistan. “This is a very musical country with a huge range of different music,” he said. “It’s not that easy just to ban music. But they’re doing what they can.”
Mr. Bacha said he was not hopeful about his homeland’s future.
“If it continues like this, and these fanatics get power, our social fabric, our institutions — everything will be destroyed,” he said. “I don’t know what these elements want to have in their lives, what their world would be like.”
In the way of many musicians who come to New York who were accustomed to be big fish in smaller musical ponds, Mr. Bacha is adjusting to diminished prospects. Last week in New Jersey, for example, he played a wedding, something that his associates say he would never have done back home. On Saturday he will play at St. Michael’s Rectory in Bedford, Mass., and on Oct. 24 he will perform again in New York, at the Adria Hotel in Bayside, Queens.
“Wherever I find Pashtuns I can live as a singer,” Mr. Bacha said. “It could be America. It could be any part of the world.”
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Turkish bus driver jailed for playing Kurdish recording
The brief news item and the song in question (translated) at Freemuse. Also, read a story about a ten-month sentence Turkey gave to a Kurdish musician because he performed a Kurdish song in Turkey.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Cuban band battles censorship
Cuban band battles censorship
MSNBC Worldblog
Posted: Friday, October 05, 2007 12:59 PM
Categories: Havana, Cuba
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
A top Cuban rock band – "Moneda Dura" – is in trouble with government censors. Someone decided their newest song is too controversial. Presumably it’s been perceived as too unfavorable to the Cuban government – so it’s been banned on all state-run airwaves.
But, the songwriter feels his work is misunderstood. "We did something important, that mattered to the people who listen," said Nassiry Lugo, the band leader.
VIDEO: Cuba censors hit song
The song is entitled "Mala Leche" – Cuban slang for "evil intentions." It’s the title track on their latest CD, released this summer on the island’s Egrem label.
Despite the official ban – or maybe helped by it – Mala Leche is gaining fame.
Local fans are downloading the contraband from YouTube – and then, sending it straight to the Cuban underground.
Proof that in today’s high-tech world, censorship is no match for a good song.
VIDEO: "Mala Leche" music video
And here is a translation of the "Mala Leche" lyrics:
Evil Intentions
It’s 4 o’clock, the bus is still not here
People around me won’t stop talking
and they drive you nuts
Sweat rolls down my ears
I’m talking about just another typical day
It’s 6.45, I get on the crowded bus
Nauseated by the bad smell of the guy beside me
People pushing all the time
People with evil intentions
Others who hammer my ears
We’re a mixture of grease and iron
We’re like cows hurrying to the slaughter-house
We’re like ants going into a hole
We’re a ball of fire
I find people who live to make things worse for me
People who don’t talk, only bark
People who spit words
If I don’t hurt you, don’t pick on me
If I don’t hurt you, why your evil intentions?
Ah! Tell me what I did to you to make you target me
Relax and cooperate,
Can't operate on the fat in your brain
Don’t take it so hard, your shouting unnerves me
Ah! But tell me, tell me
Why your evil intentions?
7 o’clock in the morning, I slowly eat breakfast
As if I lived in a palace
(Instead of) this tenement and its noise
The lights are still not on
Without a doubt, today will be fun
I spend 15 minutes spying on my neighbour
I get turned on and she doesn’t even look at me
The electricity bill is killing me
But what can I do, if living is also killing me
Now my brain is in a coma
Now my life is a car without tires
Now I was so happy with my vices
All is well when I'm immoveable
I don’t bring solutions, I don’t give surprises
Why am I to be blamed because of your headaches
If we're doing the same, don’t obsess on me
Give your brain a chance to relax
We come from a unique lineage
If we're the heat that burns deeply,
Why don’t we treat each other as brothers
My heart beats when they call me Cuban
MALA LECHE ( POR MONEDA DURA )
Las 4 de la tarde, la guagua que no llega
La gente que no para de hablar y que se desespera
Gotas de sudor que caen por mis ojeras
Te cuento de otro día normal
Las 6:45 me subo apretado
Revuelto por el mal olor que trae el tipo de al lado
La gente que te empuja todo el tiempo
Gente sin pena, otros que taladran fuerte en las orejas.
Somos una masa de grasa y acero
Somos como vacas que se apuran hasta el matadero
Somos las hormigas que van al agujero
Somos una braza de fuego
Y todavía me encuentro con gente que vive
Para ponérmela más mala
Gente que no habla, solo que te ladra
Gente que escupe las palabras
Si yo no te hago daño, no es pa’ que te despeches
Si yo no te hago daño
¿Cuál es tu mala leche?
Ay! Pero dime qué te hice para que me toques las narices
Relájate y coopera la grasa en el cerebro no se opera
Oye no es para tanto, tus gritos ya me vienen estresando
Ay! Pero dime, dime, dime
¿Cuál es tu mala leche?
7 de la mañana desayuno despacio
Como si estuviera en un palacio
El barrio con su bulla
La luz que no ha venido
Hoy va a ser, sin duda, un día entretenido
Paso 15 minutos espiando a mi vecina
Yo que me enveneno y la muy zorra no me mira
La cuenta de la electricidad me está acabando
Pero qué voy a hacer si es que vivir me está matando
Ahora que tengo mi cerebro en coma
Ahora que el carro de mi vida está sin gomas
Ahora que estaba tan tranquilo con mis vicios
Ahora que todo sale cuando me encapricho
No traigo soluciones, no regalo sorpresas
Qué culpa tengo yo de tus dolores de cabeza
Si estamos en lo mismo, no te ofendas no te reprendas
Dale un chance a tu cerebro pa’ que se distienda
Venimos de una estirpe única en el mundo
Si somos el calor que quema desde lo más profundo
Dime por qué no nos tratamos como hermanos
Me late el corazón cuando me dicen cubano.
MSNBC Worldblog
Posted: Friday, October 05, 2007 12:59 PM
Categories: Havana, Cuba
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
A top Cuban rock band – "Moneda Dura" – is in trouble with government censors. Someone decided their newest song is too controversial. Presumably it’s been perceived as too unfavorable to the Cuban government – so it’s been banned on all state-run airwaves.
But, the songwriter feels his work is misunderstood. "We did something important, that mattered to the people who listen," said Nassiry Lugo, the band leader.
VIDEO: Cuba censors hit song
The song is entitled "Mala Leche" – Cuban slang for "evil intentions." It’s the title track on their latest CD, released this summer on the island’s Egrem label.
Despite the official ban – or maybe helped by it – Mala Leche is gaining fame.
Local fans are downloading the contraband from YouTube – and then, sending it straight to the Cuban underground.
Proof that in today’s high-tech world, censorship is no match for a good song.
VIDEO: "Mala Leche" music video
And here is a translation of the "Mala Leche" lyrics:
Evil Intentions
It’s 4 o’clock, the bus is still not here
People around me won’t stop talking
and they drive you nuts
Sweat rolls down my ears
I’m talking about just another typical day
It’s 6.45, I get on the crowded bus
Nauseated by the bad smell of the guy beside me
People pushing all the time
People with evil intentions
Others who hammer my ears
We’re a mixture of grease and iron
We’re like cows hurrying to the slaughter-house
We’re like ants going into a hole
We’re a ball of fire
I find people who live to make things worse for me
People who don’t talk, only bark
People who spit words
If I don’t hurt you, don’t pick on me
If I don’t hurt you, why your evil intentions?
Ah! Tell me what I did to you to make you target me
Relax and cooperate,
Can't operate on the fat in your brain
Don’t take it so hard, your shouting unnerves me
Ah! But tell me, tell me
Why your evil intentions?
7 o’clock in the morning, I slowly eat breakfast
As if I lived in a palace
(Instead of) this tenement and its noise
The lights are still not on
Without a doubt, today will be fun
I spend 15 minutes spying on my neighbour
I get turned on and she doesn’t even look at me
The electricity bill is killing me
But what can I do, if living is also killing me
Now my brain is in a coma
Now my life is a car without tires
Now I was so happy with my vices
All is well when I'm immoveable
I don’t bring solutions, I don’t give surprises
Why am I to be blamed because of your headaches
If we're doing the same, don’t obsess on me
Give your brain a chance to relax
We come from a unique lineage
If we're the heat that burns deeply,
Why don’t we treat each other as brothers
My heart beats when they call me Cuban
MALA LECHE ( POR MONEDA DURA )
Las 4 de la tarde, la guagua que no llega
La gente que no para de hablar y que se desespera
Gotas de sudor que caen por mis ojeras
Te cuento de otro día normal
Las 6:45 me subo apretado
Revuelto por el mal olor que trae el tipo de al lado
La gente que te empuja todo el tiempo
Gente sin pena, otros que taladran fuerte en las orejas.
Somos una masa de grasa y acero
Somos como vacas que se apuran hasta el matadero
Somos las hormigas que van al agujero
Somos una braza de fuego
Y todavía me encuentro con gente que vive
Para ponérmela más mala
Gente que no habla, solo que te ladra
Gente que escupe las palabras
Si yo no te hago daño, no es pa’ que te despeches
Si yo no te hago daño
¿Cuál es tu mala leche?
Ay! Pero dime qué te hice para que me toques las narices
Relájate y coopera la grasa en el cerebro no se opera
Oye no es para tanto, tus gritos ya me vienen estresando
Ay! Pero dime, dime, dime
¿Cuál es tu mala leche?
7 de la mañana desayuno despacio
Como si estuviera en un palacio
El barrio con su bulla
La luz que no ha venido
Hoy va a ser, sin duda, un día entretenido
Paso 15 minutos espiando a mi vecina
Yo que me enveneno y la muy zorra no me mira
La cuenta de la electricidad me está acabando
Pero qué voy a hacer si es que vivir me está matando
Ahora que tengo mi cerebro en coma
Ahora que el carro de mi vida está sin gomas
Ahora que estaba tan tranquilo con mis vicios
Ahora que todo sale cuando me encapricho
No traigo soluciones, no regalo sorpresas
Qué culpa tengo yo de tus dolores de cabeza
Si estamos en lo mismo, no te ofendas no te reprendas
Dale un chance a tu cerebro pa’ que se distienda
Venimos de una estirpe única en el mundo
Si somos el calor que quema desde lo más profundo
Dime por qué no nos tratamos como hermanos
Me late el corazón cuando me dicen cubano.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
China's Latest Export: Anti-Establishment Music
Morning Edition, August 17, 2007 · China, the world's top exporter of laptop computers, T-shirts and toys is now trying to export indie rock. The country's largest independent record label has just released its first album in the United States, by a band called Rebuilding the Rights of Statues.
The band toured the United States before the album's release, performing at the South by Southwest musical festival in Austin, Texas, and several shows in New York.
The art of making anti-establishment music in a non-democratic state can come in the translation. The three members of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS for short, compose in English.
The band is required to translate all of its lyrics into Chinese and submit them to the government for approval.
Meng Jin Hui is a manager at Modern Sky, China's largest independent record label.
"Maybe sometimes when we translate, it might be wrong," he says.
For example, the band translated the title of its song "Hang the Police" as "the police are laughing."
Often they'll translate literally. As is the case with any language, the literal translations sometimes don't make sense. And that can work to the band's advantage.
Still, lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong insists he's not intimidated by the government censors.
"It's like a game of cat and mouse to see who can win," he says.
Hua says that dealing with the government forces his band to be subtler in its lyrics.
"It's just different from the West, where people are very direct with what they say," he says. "They just say what they want. But in China how we say things is not very direct. I think this adds depth to what we're doing, and it's fun."
Hua's pragmatic view is typical of many rock musicians in China who grew up in the '80s and '90s during the country's rapid economic boom.
Shen Li Hui founded the Modern Sky label 10 years ago when his own band wanted to record an album.
"Actually the Chinese government is not really that bad," he says. "Within the last 10 years, it has changed quite a bit. Of course, the situation is still not ideal, but the government is more open and liberal than before."
China's first generation of rock bands emerged a few years before the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Those groups focused more on politics. Today's bands are more interested in art, Shen says.
But the art still needs some work, says Trey McArver. He traveled to China four years ago and discovered an indie rock scene in Wuhan, a grimy industrial city of more than 8 million people, where he now owns a club with a Chinese partner.
McArver says his first encounter with the music captured the excitement of shows in the United States.
"It was in this abandoned building on the fifth floor," he recalls. "It was dirty. And there were all these kids there with mohawks and tight, black jeans, and just something I had not seen in China at all."
Then, the music started.
"They couldn't even play their instruments," McArver says. "They would play for 30 seconds or a minute and they would have to stop and they would start over, or try to go to the next song."
Many bands, McArver says, are simply copying things they've heard from Western acts.
Re-TROS' musicians say they're influenced by groups like Interpol, Gang of Four and Joy Division.
McArver says that while Re-TROS' songs aren't completely original, the band still has something to say.
"It's a little bit more thoughtful and it's very sincere," he says. "They're not making music to be cool."
A steady performance schedule earns Re-TROS the equivalent of $300 dollars a month, barely enough for the three musicians to live on in Beijing. But right now, they say their main goal is to make music.
Re-TROS bass player Liu Min says that one benefit to releasing an album in the United States is to show Americans a side of China they might not have heard before.
"We don't expect it will be a big seller," she says. "But of course, we are excited to come to the U.S., the most developed rock 'n' roll market in the world. And if Americans hear us, they might see the progress that rock 'n' roll music in China has made."
The band toured the United States before the album's release, performing at the South by Southwest musical festival in Austin, Texas, and several shows in New York.
The art of making anti-establishment music in a non-democratic state can come in the translation. The three members of Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, or Re-TROS for short, compose in English.
The band is required to translate all of its lyrics into Chinese and submit them to the government for approval.
Meng Jin Hui is a manager at Modern Sky, China's largest independent record label.
"Maybe sometimes when we translate, it might be wrong," he says.
For example, the band translated the title of its song "Hang the Police" as "the police are laughing."
Often they'll translate literally. As is the case with any language, the literal translations sometimes don't make sense. And that can work to the band's advantage.
Still, lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong insists he's not intimidated by the government censors.
"It's like a game of cat and mouse to see who can win," he says.
Hua says that dealing with the government forces his band to be subtler in its lyrics.
"It's just different from the West, where people are very direct with what they say," he says. "They just say what they want. But in China how we say things is not very direct. I think this adds depth to what we're doing, and it's fun."
Hua's pragmatic view is typical of many rock musicians in China who grew up in the '80s and '90s during the country's rapid economic boom.
Shen Li Hui founded the Modern Sky label 10 years ago when his own band wanted to record an album.
"Actually the Chinese government is not really that bad," he says. "Within the last 10 years, it has changed quite a bit. Of course, the situation is still not ideal, but the government is more open and liberal than before."
China's first generation of rock bands emerged a few years before the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Those groups focused more on politics. Today's bands are more interested in art, Shen says.
But the art still needs some work, says Trey McArver. He traveled to China four years ago and discovered an indie rock scene in Wuhan, a grimy industrial city of more than 8 million people, where he now owns a club with a Chinese partner.
McArver says his first encounter with the music captured the excitement of shows in the United States.
"It was in this abandoned building on the fifth floor," he recalls. "It was dirty. And there were all these kids there with mohawks and tight, black jeans, and just something I had not seen in China at all."
Then, the music started.
"They couldn't even play their instruments," McArver says. "They would play for 30 seconds or a minute and they would have to stop and they would start over, or try to go to the next song."
Many bands, McArver says, are simply copying things they've heard from Western acts.
Re-TROS' musicians say they're influenced by groups like Interpol, Gang of Four and Joy Division.
McArver says that while Re-TROS' songs aren't completely original, the band still has something to say.
"It's a little bit more thoughtful and it's very sincere," he says. "They're not making music to be cool."
A steady performance schedule earns Re-TROS the equivalent of $300 dollars a month, barely enough for the three musicians to live on in Beijing. But right now, they say their main goal is to make music.
Re-TROS bass player Liu Min says that one benefit to releasing an album in the United States is to show Americans a side of China they might not have heard before.
"We don't expect it will be a big seller," she says. "But of course, we are excited to come to the U.S., the most developed rock 'n' roll market in the world. And if Americans hear us, they might see the progress that rock 'n' roll music in China has made."
Monday, July 23, 2007
Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport
Great video (labeled a work in progress) with artists and scholars discussing audio sampling. Saw it first on Audio Lemon via Copyright Criminals.
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