For these five artists, creation is an act of resistance, and anti-colonialism is the methodology.
Ask any serious artist about their methodologies, and you’ll likely learn about the techniques they employ in their work, as well as their daily routines and training regimens; about what inspires and motivates them to create the work they do. Ask these five musicians that same question, and you’ll recognize a pattern in their responses: For Anaís Azul, AV María, slic, Dania, and Amita Vempati, anti-colonialism is the methodology.
Since colonialism itself is actions-based, anti-colonialism is also very much about what one does, not simply what one believes. These artists are all politically outspoken. All come from cultures that have been colonized, but they are also citizens of the world’s most powerful imperial machine: the United States. To oppose colonialism can never just be ideological or intellectual, although those components are foundational. In their art and in their lives, these five musicians contend with that duality, and create as an act of resistance—against their oppression, and against the systems that make them oppressors, contrary to their will.
Anaís Azul
(Photo by Joma Geneciran, courtesy of Anaís Azul.)
Anaís Azul is a queer, nonbinary, Peruvian American vocalist, composer, educator, and activist based in Los Angeles, California. They speak three languages and write music in all of them: Spanish, English, and Quechua, the language of their indigenous Andean lineage. They have a B.A. in music composition and theory, a master’s in performance and composition, and are now pursuing a doctorate in digital composition. With a background rooted in academia, and a socio-political praxis rooted in an amalgam of leftist, populist ideologies, Anaís has developed a clear-eyed vision of who they are: someone who uses their gifts, talents, education, and connections to deliberately subvert the culture of fascism that has come to define the United States, both locally and abroad.
Anaís sings and writes about healing and resistance, and they emphasize the importance of tapping into one’s feelings, especially during bleak times such as the ones we live in. They described playing a recent Pride show, and being the first performer of the day to talk about Gaza on stage.
“It feels weird to just sit here and smile and pretend everything's okay at this sunny Pride celebration,” Anaís said to the crowd. “But there is no pride in genocide. I really hope that my music can bring people into their bodies; into the complexity of reality and into their emotions.”
Anaís believes their acknowledgement of the current genocide helped the audience engage with the layered nuance of the moment: A crowd formed around them in response, and after the show, a line of concertgoers stood waiting to chat with them offstage.
Over the past several years, through their reclamation of Quechua, as well as their learning to play charango, which they describe as “a colonial instrument with an indigenous twist,” the gravitational pull of Anaís’s music has become more and more explicitly oriented towards antifascism. Recently, they started a collective with some friends called RAWR (Rapid Arts Workers Response). The group takes vital information, such as migrant resources or local jail support numbers, and turns them into easy-to-remember musical jingles, which they then spread on social media.They describe their determination to use social media as a tool for subversion, rather than ego.
“In the music industry at this point, even in the indie music world, the obligation to use social media makes me feel like colonialism is at my throat,” they say. “I don't want to feel like I'm aspiring towards viral reels. I want my music to touch people. I want my music to be heard, because I do believe in the healing powers of it, because it has healing for me, and I believe that that will have healing for others.”
AV María
(Photo by Alana Serbiá, courtesy of AV María.)
An indigenous Puerto Rican trans woman, AV María spent her early adulthood studying photography in New York before returning to Puerto Rico in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017.
“I was just really disturbed the whole event,” she says. “It was hard to see my family struggle, queer folk struggling on the island, and I chose to come back. I've been here for seven years now.”
Hurricane María’s aftereffects were horrendously compounded by the supreme neglect of the colonizing U.S. government, both in Washington, DC, and through locally installed politicians; some of which the island still deals with today. Once home, AV María began to pursue music, in part with the goal of lyrically confronting these same oppressive power regimes. In 2020, she worked with renowned reggaeton producer, Eduardo Cabra, to release her first single, “Casablanca,” which is an indictment of colonial government structures as a whole. She was invited in 2024 to perform “Casablanca” at Transmission, which is New York City’s premiere trans music fest.
Since then, AV María has become known for her catchy, feminist, political music and videos, such as the sapphic anthem, “TOTONKA!" She’s now working on an album that focuses on her internal landscape, which, she says, these days, often looks like rage, depression, and sadness, largely due to the state of the world.
“It's very hard to feel helpless when such brute power is in control,” she says. “I have my own personal powers, you know, but as a Puerto Rican trans woman I feel like I don’t have any real systemic power. That's been really, really, really hard; to balance out hopelessness and hope. Sometimes it's difficult to imagine a future in which we all still exist.”
To cope with these feelings, she communes with nature, and with other trans and non-binary people, something essential to her well-being.
“I also feel like having a non-binary philosophy is very important in decolonizing our systems, so I definitely try and really embed it into my music and my writing,” she says.
slic
(Photo by Corey Jermaine, courtesy of slic.)
Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, slic grew up in Florida before attending Amherst College in Massachusetts. At school, they had a political awakening while participating in student protests during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2014, and after graduating, moved to New York City, where they’ve remained politically active ever since.
“In 2020, between COVID and the uprisings, I shifted what matters to me, what I pay attention to, and what kinds of relationships I have with people,” slic says.
These days, slic is a hyperpop musician, producer, DJ, and video editor. They spend a large amount of their time organizing for tenants’ rights in New York City, as well as using their performances and social media platforms to draw attention to Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide of Palestinians and to raise money for their friend in Gaza. They say that, both as an artist and a person, community is what keeps them going.
“I have a lot more people in my life now than I did in 2019 who share my values; share my politics,” slic says. “Now, if I see an opportunity to act on something politically, I have the ability to do something about it because I've built relationships with people who will join me.”
Lately, slic has been turning to traditional Venezuelan music as blueprints for both communal creativity and strength. They are drawing inspiration from Afro-Venezuelan tambores, which arrived to the Americas with enslaved Africans and is used as a tool for communication, community, and spirituality; and tonadas de ordeño, a style of Venezuelan “work songs,” which are traditionally sung communally to calm cows during the milking process.
“I was always looking for a way to feel less alienated. The way that we organize life [in America]—the individualism of it, the commodification—I think art can do things to break that,” says slic.
Dania
(Photo by Adam Ginsberg, courtesy of Dania.)
Based in New York City, Syrian/Croatian American singer/songwriter Dania used to spend her summers in Syria before the war. But ever since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last year, she’s been feeling a lot of mixed emotions about what the future holds for Syrians, as a whole.
“I don't think anyone truly understands what Syrians went through over the last…however many years,” she says. “I’m happy Assad is gone. He destroyed so many families, including my own; so I feel a cautious hope, [but] then also worry. ‘Tumultuous’ is the best word to describe what I’m feeling.”
To counter feelings of hopelessness, Dania uses her growing career and platform to amplify the causes that matter to her. She prefers to perform at community events, including solidarity and aid fundraising efforts for places like Palestine and Syria. But, beyond that, she says that her music helps her cope with her feelings about the world; it also helps her process her emotions and contextualize them, and herself, within her various cultural identities.
Arab femininity factors heavily into Dania’s highly aestheticized music, videos, and performances. Influenced by the 1970s, she makes use of rich, traditional color palettes and vintage fashion motifs from throughout the Arab world. On her Instagram, she talks about being a curvy woman, and the importance of valuing cultural beauty standards beyond Eurocentric thinness. In 2024, she released a song called “Listen,” whose main refrain contains the line, “Arab girls always pretty.” She performed “Listen” at a recent block party in Queens, and was overjoyed at the response from the crowd.
“There were these young Arab girls there. And when I performed the song, I got to see them dance around to, ‘Arab girls always pretty,’ and it was so affirming,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the moment that I'm working for.’”
Amita Vempati
(Photo by Benjamin Loveless, courtesy of Amita Vempati.)
Amita Vempati is an Indian American singer and the Development Manager for Artistic Freedom Initiative, which is a nonprofit that helps refugee artists throughout the world in their relocation efforts.
For several years prior, she worked as a program coordinator for the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a collective of musicians focused on creating events, albums, and education within classical South Asian music. Through her recent work with the collective, Amita helped produce several series showcasing artists from marginalized South Asian communities, an experience that she says helped her understand her own identity as a descendent of a more privileged Indian caste.
“I think many people don't know this, but the dynamics of castes, and the system of socioeconomic segregation, really follow people into the diaspora and become trends here, too,” she says.
In addition to her community work, Amita describes undergoing a personal evolution rooted in music. Born with a natural love of performing, she was raised to believe that in order to be worthy of getting on stage, she had to be a nearly “perfect” musician. They were also confronted with devaluations of non-Western art.
She recalls a time when her parents encouraged her to quit Indian classical music. “They said that colleges would prefer [if I played] Western classical violin,” Amita says.
Amita says that she internalized capitalist and colonialist standards of perfection that hindered her from being able to see their true artistic potential.
Now in her thirties, Amita is a very serious student of folkloric musical traditions from the Balkans, Turkey, and India, and travels the world to perform in various festivals and choirs. She is passionate about advocating for folkloric art as an incredibly valuable human asset: a site of both cultural preservation, and an opportunity for cross-cultural connection. As an artist and someone who works in the industry of folkloric performance arts, Amita stresses the need for both individual artists, and arts institutions, to be consciously anti-colonial.
“It’s really critical that when you engage in an art form, you strive to become aware of everything that that art form brings in its practice,” she says. “That can include anything, down to the composition, the form, the space that you're performing in, the audience that you're performing for.”
[post_title] => How to Be an Anti-Colonial Musician
[post_excerpt] => For these five artists, creation is an act of resistance, and anti-colonialism is the methodology.
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How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.
Four gunshots and the sound of a cash register: In her 2007 hit “Paper Planes,” British-Sri Lankan rapper and singer M.I.A. (a.k.a., Maya Arulpragasam) interpolated these sounds between sharp lyricism that satirized Western perceptions of third world immigrants and the xenophobia that became especially rampant after 9/11. Against all odds, the world couldn’t help rapping along.
Later, the song would be named one of the top five best of the decade by Rolling Stone, one of the most-streamed of the decade by Apple, and the greatest song by any 21st century woman+ by NPR. Its success was as much due to its catchy refrain as it was to its unexpected content, especially at the time: The song was arguably the first rap song from the South Asian diaspora to articulate the increasingly politicized identities of South Asian migrants and second-generation immigrants to a mainstream global audience.
While the artist behind the song has since become a somewhat controversial figure, the impact of “Paper Planes” remains. And nearly two decades later, rappers from all over the South Asian diaspora have become a testament to the increasing globalization of hip hop, a subculture rooted in resistance, and its power as a language of global protest.
Founded in the Bronx during the 1970s, hip hop was born as a form of expression and resistance in Black and Latino communities, and as a genre, it’s only grown exponentially since. Throughout the 80s, as production and sampling technology became more accessible, hip hop began gaining traction on a wider scale, and eventually, was no longer limited to live performance, thanks to the popularity of shows like Yo! MTV Raps. By the 90s, it had broken into the mainstream, due to the meteoric rise of MTV, BET’s Rap City, and albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of the Black Planet” achieving commercial success. This mainstream eruption of hip hop also coincided with South Asian Americans using rap to articulate their own immigrant identity for the first time—and now, in the streaming age, the subgenre has only boomed.
Last August, South Indian rapper Hanumankind, who spent his early childhood in Houston, Texas, went viral for his roaring hit “Big Dawgs,” a song about defying cultural stereotypes. The music video, which has over 218 million views on YouTube, features riders on motorcycles zipping around a “well of death,” a spectacle common in Northern India—the video at times feeling like an homage to the stunt driving in the controversial but iconic music video for M.I.A.’s 2012 hit “Bad Girls.”
Hanumankind’s success is the most recognizable contemporary example of the popularity and success of hip hop from the Indian diaspora, a success that feels inherently political due to the thematic explorations of his music. “He's able to use hip hop commercially to make himself successful, while also drawing on cultural and religious symbols that make his identity very much part of Indian and Hindu culture,” says Dr. Mirali Bulaji, a professor in race, global media, and nationalism at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the 2008 book Desi Rap: Hip Hop and South Asian America.
With the myriad of backgrounds and identities that South Asian diaspora rappers have, the politics that they intentionally or unintentionally convey is dependent on not only the lyrical content of their music, but the way they market themselves. This is something Hanumankind is clearly conscious of: His visuals draw on Indian and Hindu imagery, while his music style feels distinctly American (he has cited Texan rap group UGK as one of his biggest influences). But this approach isn’t unique to Hanumankind. For his album “The Long Goodbye,” for example, British-Pakistani rapper and actor Riz Ahmed (who goes by Riz MC) released a short film that played as metaphor for the wrought relationship between South Asian Muslims and the rise of the far right in Britain. Although the visuals and lyrical content of hip hop for the diaspora varies, the thread that connects the genre is the use of cultural and religious symbols to inspire representation as a means of empowerment in the face of oppression, both for commercial reasons and not.
In an essay for Desi Rap, filmmaker and activist Raesham Chopra Nijhon writes that hip hop became a place for the broader spectrum of South Asian identity because it facilitated an accurate image of a more nuanced community than what mainstream Western culture had fabricated. As a genre, it offered a way for the South Asian diaspora to illustrate the nuances of racialization and how white supremacy functions in contexts independent from the racial dynamics that exist between white and Black people. The charged lyricism and dynamic cadences also offered a new way for South Asians, specifically in the U.S., to articulate their identity outside of the Black and white paradigm.
“It was a generation of young people who truly were looking for some way to express their identity, their angst about being othered, and finding ways to communicate that they were explicitly American yet global at the same time,” Balaji says.
It was these elements, along with similarities in the syncopation of both Punjabi music and hip hop, that drew Punjabi Canadian Taj Bhangu, who goes by the name Lioness Kaur, to become a rapper. “When the West really looks at South Asian music, they really just see it in this really cliched way and I feel like hip hop's such a great art form for bridging those gaps,” says Bhangu. Defying these cliches, she believes, shouldn’t be wholly dependent on its visuals, but also the music itself.
In an Instagram caption promoting her latest single, “Long Lost Brother,” Bhangu writes she wanted to fuse South Asian sonics with hip hop in a way that wasn’t orientalist. For her, this led to both a blending of sounds and culture: Most of Bhangu’s music intersperses exuberant strings with twangy sitar. In “Long Lost Brother,” this sitar doubles as the cyclical rhythm she raps over while she details memories of her childhood, with nods to both her Sikh Punjabi and Canadian upbringings: “Eating McDonald's, Roseborough Centre / Adventures and pulling pranks / Pulling Biji′s old crutches out / From under the bed.”
In her song “Politics at Home,” Bhangu further details her experience living in a joint family home, something common amongst South Asian families. Throughout the song, Bhangu talks about the misogyny that many Indian Canadians witness growing up, and connects the struggle her mother’s family faced going back home to the “pind” (“the village” in Sikh) with issues of class and the neglect of certain areas due to government corruption: “The pind could be the hood at times / They grinded to make it here, only to return / Put their dreams in an urn / They yearned for their daughter, my mother.”
Watching one’s mother deal with the loneliness and helplessness of generational misogyny isn’t an experience unique to the South Asian diaspora, but rather, a ubiquitous one—which is part of why her music has found a broader audience. But for those within the diaspora, Bhangu’s music articulates that emotional isolation in a way that is uniquely familiar, combining the linguistics of Western hip hop with South Asian instrumentals.
We see this use of more traditional instrumentals as a tool for blending cultures across the genre, including use of the dhol and chenda drums, traditionally played at religious ceremonies and cultural gatherings to bring communities together. Their exhilarating reverberation and almost unadulterated pace resembles that of the rapid yet succinctly meaningful rhythms fundamental to hip hop. In this way, the steady bass intrinsic to the sounds of both genres incites an intoxicatingly invigorating and empowering feeling that can be and has been used to rally and mobilize movements, political or otherwise. (Something producer Timbaland clearly appreciated in the ‘90s and early aughts, when he sampled South Asian instrumentals in multiple chart-topping hits like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and The Game’s “Put You on the Game.”)
Of course, the South Asian diaspora isn’t homogenous, and South Asian hip hop isn’t either. It encapsulates countless subgenres, from the Punjabi hip hop that inspires Bhangu, which uses both the language and traditional instruments like the sitar and the dhol; to Desi hip hop, which encapsulates a combination of influences from the South Asian diaspora, including that of Indian Americans.
Hip hop also isn’t the first or only form of protest music within the diaspora. South Asian protest music can be traced back to the independence movement during British colonial rule across the continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Stanford ethnomusicologist Anna Schultz, the kirtan, a call-and-response form of singing and chanting Hindu mantras, was crucial in prompting protests against British rule and leading to political reform. “Through performance, they [kirtan performers] use signs in finely attuned ways to bring politics and religion together so that they are just one tightly bound unit of meaning,” Schultz said in an interview with Stanford Arts.
What was once resistance against British colonial rule, however, eventually evolved into Hindu nationalism; and this evolution of revolutionary politics packaged into the commercialization of empowerment has not spared South Asian hip hop. For both genres of music, directly combating and even angering the systems that encourage whiteness, colonialism, and capitalism are central to their origins. But as contemporary identity politics prioritize the optics of representation, it's easy for rappers from marginalized communities to fall into the trap of using their art to partake in shallow representation politics rather than engage in the tangible interest of their communities.
The obfuscation of hip hop’s political roots isn’t unique to the South Asian diaspora; however, its rising popularity within the diaspora coincided with the broader genre more generally becoming an asset for the commodification of resistance politics, something that has affected South Asian rap and hip hop today.
Balaji notes that despite many South Asian activists and rappers proclaiming hip hop as their tool of resistance, many don’t seem to demonstrate it in action. Last September, for example, Hanumankind performed “Big Dawgs” at a venue in Long Island in which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was present, and was later pictured hugging him in front of the crowd. Modi has long been criticized for his Hindu nationalist statements and policies, barring Muslims from extensive citizenship and revoking the Kashmir region’s autonomous status.
While Hanumankind hasn’t been explicitly critical of Modi or his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in his 2021 single “Genghis,” the rapper, whose given name is Sooraj Cherukat, discusses the tribulations of street life in South India and attributes violence to the complicity of the Indian government: “But what you partying for? / We got issues in our nation 'cause there's parties at war / When our leaders aren't leading at the heart and core / And they tamper with evidence when you gon' file a report.”
Still, none of this has stopped South Asian rap’s momentum, or its resonance. The subgenre also feels especially powerful for many South Asians today because of its mainstream popularity—giving voice and a platform to a diaspora that has long suffered from intergenerational trauma amongst the many ramifications of whiteness and British imperialism. It’s also unlikely to die down any time soon. According to Business Insider, the rise of South Asian talent from all over the diaspora, and the increasingly popular mashup of South Asian artists making music over Western beats, can be credited in large part to the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Consequently, Balaji predicts the ever-increasing popularity of these streaming platforms, combined with the ability for anyone to create their own audiences on social media and the effects of migration on immigrant identities, will only lead to South Asian rap becoming an increasingly globalized genre.
“Artists in their respective countries are going to be able to articulate identities that are unique to their cultural and political circumstances,” says Balaji. We’re already seeing this today: Whether it’s Riz MC, Raja Kumari, or Yung Raja, rappers and artists across the diaspora are finding ways to honor their roots without straying from hip hop’s own.
Bhangu is one of these artists, merging the lyrical syncopation and metrical soul that is found in both hip hop and South Asian music, to give voice to being a Sikh Punjabi woman in Canada.
“I'm breaking a lot of barriers. As a girl, people don't really see that many female South Asian rappers, so it’s a shock for so many people,” she says. “But there are a lot of people who do support and dig deeper into the art and they feel heard.”
[post_title] => The Diverse Politics of Desi Hip Hop
[post_excerpt] => How South Asian rappers are honoring the diaspora—and hip hop’s roots.
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[post_content] => The Cuban government is enraged at the song's message and its popularity.
‘Patria o muerte’ — homeland or death. Those three words can be found all over Cuba: on graffiti, murals, government signs, state media, money. While alive, Fidel Castro repeated them often, turning them into a slogan emblazoned on the consciousness of the people; a definition of what it means to be a true Cuban after the 1959 revolution. But a song released by Cuban artists in late February took those words and inverted their meaning. “Patria y Vida,” the song is called, Homeland and Life.
The lyrics and the video have taken the island and its diaspora by storm. They have also enraged the Cuban government.
The song is a rebuke of the regime, accusing the government of playing its people like dominos. “Patria y Vida” has turned into a rallying cry and a powerful call for Cubans to abandon fear, speak truth to power and demand the island take care of their own as well as they take care of tourists and foreign interests. It’s a collaboration between Cuban musicians both off the island—including Grammy winner Descemer Bueno, rapper Yotuel, the reggaeton duo Gente de Zona—and dissident musicians on the island including Maykel Osorbo, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and El Funky, who are part of the grassroots San Isidro movement for of artists and intellectuals combating the prohibition of artistic freedom. The mere presence of these men in the video puts them at risk; they had to film it in secret.
The video, which has so far been viewed 4 million times, is relatively simple in execution. It opens with an image of José Martí, one of the island’s most celebrated national heroes, burning away to reveal the face of George Washington, in a criticism directed at the government for its interest in foreign currency over the well-being of its citizens. The video is a montage of footage made by artists in Cuba and afuera (outside), along with clips from San Isidro protests and subsequent arrests. “Se acabó, ya se venció tu tiempo, se rompió el silencio,” they sing again and again in the song. “It’s over, your time is up, and the silence has been broken.” In an act now being repeated across social media, Yotuel also has the words ‘Patria y Vida’ written in white across his chest.
Cindy Ermus, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a Cuban-American, pointed to the many reasons the song has exploded both on the island and in the diaspora. She identifies the new expansion of internet access in Cuba as one consideration, adding that everyone she’s spoken with in Cuba seems to have heard it. “‘Patria y vida’ is quickly becoming a new rallying cry alongside ‘Cuba libre!’ and ‘libertad!’” she tells The Conversationalist. “One can find the phrase on shirts, stickers, and other items, as well as in the form of art installations and graffiti in Cuba, Miami, and across the diaspora.”
The video explodes with grief and pain—hand movements showing the pent up frustration and facial expressions spilling over with anguish. There is also sheer bravery in the act of this art. In an interview, the members of Gente de Zona, who now live in Miami, said they kept silent about their beliefs for years, worried about the repercussions that family members who still live on the island would face. But, they added, now is the time to leave behind their fear and speak out. “The price of this song is that I won’t be able to return to Cuba,” Descemer told journalist Jorge Ramos in the New York Times.
“The youth of Cuba want life, they want another Cuba, other air, liberty, rights, dreams,” Yotuel told Ramos. “We don’t want the option to be death.”
“Our hope is that the situation in Cuba improves,” Gente de Zona’s Alexandre Delgado told Billboard. “We deserve a change in 2021, and our country has no need to be suffering as it has for generations. It’s been 62 years with the same government that has hurt Cuba and its people, leaving youth with no hope. We’ve also been victims for the simple fact of thinking different, of not being Communist. We’ve been attacked and censored.”
Academics the world over have stressed the song’s importance. In a Twitter thread Ana Dopico, director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, wrote: “‘Patria y vida,’ in 3 little words, wakes us up from a dream, or a stupor. Forced choices are refused. Life is affirmed. Make the nation or die, the old saying demands. Either way there is victory. The artists, the song, the video refuse this, and the nation is joined to life.”
The Cuban government’s response to ‘Patria y Vida’ has been vitriolic. As Ramos wrote in the Times, the fact that they have publicly responded shows the power of the song and its popularity. “This song full of hate that tries to make fun of everything we are, everything we gave to be free,” declared the writer of an article in the Cuban government run paper Granma. “Its hate doesn’t represent me. Its horrible lyrics don’t represent me. Gente de Zona doesn’t represent me.”
‘Patria y Vida’ is the latest in a wave of statements by Cuban artists and musicians who are risking their safety to speak out against the communist government and Fidel Castro. In a December interview for the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady interviewed Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one of the leaders of the San Isidro Movement, who appears in the ‘Patria y Vida’ video; she asked him for his thoughts on Castro. “His answer stunned not because I disagreed but because challenging the godlike myth of the comandante, alive or dead, has always been taboo,” she wrote. “‘For me he was a bad person, and what he did is not justified by what he did in things like health care,’ the 33-year-old performance artist said. ‘If you repress someone because they wrote a poem you don’t like or you arrest young people continually, you are not a good person. This repression has destroyed the lives of intellectuals.’”
Demonstrating how much the song has rattled the Cuban government, President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez tweeted repeatedly on the matter. “Patria o muerte! Thousands of us shouted last night,” he wrote on February 19. “They wanted to erase our slogan and we made it go viral.”
“We must acknowledge the struggle of the Cuban people, and the fact that so many—and each day more—have become exasperated with the rhetoric and the repression that in part characterizes the Cuban government,” Ermus tells The Conversationalist. “With its calls for libertad, and with its artists’ plea for dignity and for respect—‘Somos la dignidad de un pueblo entero pisoteada,’ a reasonable appeal for the right to artistic expression and an end to violence—a song like this is bound to resonate with the Cuban people, and indeed, with all people.”
The power of the song continues to pick up momentum, with the resonance of the lyrics and the video reverberating across the Cuban community both on the island and abroad. “Publicizing a paradise,” the lyrics say of Cuba, “While mothers cry for their sons who’ve left.” The ones who left and the ones who stayed are joining their voices together, and it’s getting harder and harder for the government to keep them quiet.
[post_title] => 'Patria y Vida': the Cuban song that has become a global rallying cry
[post_excerpt] => The video of the song explodes with grief and pain—hand movements showing the pent up frustration and facial expressions spilling over with anguish.
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[post_content] => Over the past decade, women in the music industry have seen no notable improvement in visibility.
At Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, women won big. For the first time in Grammys’ history, the top four prizes went to four separate solo women: Megan Thee Stallion won Best New Artist, Taylor Swift took home Album of the Year, Billie Eilish snagged Record of the Year, and H.E.R. won for Song of the Year. Beyoncé in turn claimed four awards, which brought her lifetime total to 28—more than any other female artist, ever.
But the recognition of women at the Grammys, while welcome, is not an accurate reflection of their standing in the music industry. A study released earlier this month by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that women's place in pop music is dismal—that they are vastly underrepresented. The study showed in no uncertain terms that since 2012 no progress has been made.
The study, called “Inclusion in the Recording Studio,” is one that researcher Stacy L. Smith has been leading annually for the last four years. Smith and her team had previously conducted similar work analyzing film and television, before expanding their focus to include the music industry as well. When her first report was released in 2018, it caused a stir. The study showed that with respect to the top 600 songs since 2012, only 16.8 percent were performed by female artists; analyzing the same pool of songs, only 12.3 percent of the songwriters credited were female and 2 percent of producers. When it came to Grammy nominees, between 2013 and 2018, 90.7 percent of the nominees were male.
Neil Portnow, the then-president and CEO of the Recording Academy, which determines the Grammys, argued that if women wanted to be recognized they needed to “step up,” effectively blaming women—rather than the system—for their lack of visibility, opportunity, and recognition. The ensuing backlash included calls for Portnow’s resignation, and the rise of the popular #GrammysSoMale hashtag. A scathing open letter written by female executives from many sectors of the music world lambasted Portnow and demanded his resignation. “The statement you made this week about women in music needing to ‘step up’ was spectacularly wrong and insulting and, at its core, oblivious to the vast body of work created by and with women,” they wrote. “We do not have to sing louder, jump higher or be nicer to prove ourselves.” They added: “We step up every single day and have been doing so for a long time. The fact that you don’t realize this means it’s time for you to step down.” Portnow, it should be noted, did resign from his position in 2019 which many took as a way to gracefully remove himself from the controversy.
But the following year, even after all that noise, there was almost no change. The latest numbers released in early March, which analyze credit information from the Hot 100 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for each year from 2012-2020, actually show that women’s place in the industry is a little bit worse than it was before. Last year, women made up 20.2 percent of artists whereas the year before that the number was higher, at 22.5 percent. While women like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift take center stage, behind the scenes women are even more outnumbered. When it comes to producers, the ratio of men to women is 38 to 1, while songwriters women only make up 12.6 percent. Further on the subject of songwriters, from 2012-2020 Max Martin was the top male songwriter, with 44 credits on the songs analyzed; the top female songwriter was Nikki Minaj with only 19 credits.
The reports’ central takeaway is that over the past decade, women in the music industry have seen no notable improvement in visibility. This is true even as a number of initiatives have sprung up in recent years to try and address the industry’s systemic problems, like She Is the Music, co-founded by Alicia Keys to empower female creators.
“The advocacy around women in music has continued, but women represented less than one-third of artists, clocked in at 12.6 percent of songwriters, and were fewer than 3 percent of all producers on the popular charts between 2012 and 2020,” the authors of the Annenberg report wrote in the study’s conclusion. “The music industry must examine how its decision-making, practices, and beliefs perpetuate the underrepresentation of women artists, songwriters, and producers.”
“To fully examine this problem, we have to look at schools where females are more likely to be encouraged as vocalists than instrumentalists. While things are changing, there still exists a bias toward female ‘musicians.’ And this bias extends to any opportunities given to students to learn technology as well. Once out of school, women in the music industry aren’t taken as seriously as producers or front women of their own bands. Some genres in particular have excluded women from radio play,” explains Susan Cattaneo, a musician and associate professor of songwriting at Berklee College of Music. “The fact that women aren’t considered ‘bankable’ means they’re not given the same radio air time as their male counterparts. For every seven male artists on a country playlist, there is only one woman played.”
Cattaneo adds, “Unfortunately, the music business is still a man’s world so there is this perspective that women can’t do the job that men can do. This applies to female producers, engineers, performing artists, and songwriters. It’s a pervasive problem in all genres of music.”
“It has been wonderful to see a number of musical superstars who have taken full control over
their careers including their branding, their image and their business,” Cattaneo said. “Unfortunately, we’ve also seen that no matter who the artist is (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears), they have had to pay for that control with various kinds of backlash from the industry and their fan base.”
The Annenberg study did show a positive trend for women in terms of Grammy nominations, calling 2021, “a high point for women in nearly every category considered.” Even so, there were 198 female nominees and 655 male nominees. That said, this was the first year the Recording Academy publicly reported those numbers which is a step in the right direction.
Another glimmer of hope on the horizon is that the Recording Academy earlier this month announced they’d be partnering with Berklee College of Music and Arizona State University to conduct a study on women’s representation in the music industry. “The data collected from the study will be utilized to develop and empower the next generation of women music creators by generating actionable items and solutions to help inform the Academy’s diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives amongst its membership and the greater music industry,” the Recording Academy said in a statement.
Still it should be said that in 2019 the Recording Academy made promises to move equity forward through the establishment of an inclusion initiative called “Women in the Mix.” The goal was to increase women’s presence as producers and engineers by asking for all involved to commit to considering at least two female candidates when making hiring decisions. The announcement cited the 2018 USC Annenberg study which said only 2 percent of pop producers were women and 3 percent of sound engineers. Now in 2020 those numbers are relatively unchanged.
As Smith, who runs the Annenberg study wrote in this year’s report, “Solutions like the Women in the Mix pledge require pledge-takers who are intentional and accountable, and an industry that is committed to making change — something that clearly has not happened in this case.”
Perhaps, though, the sweep of wins for women at this year’s Grammys will be a harbinger for change. And for pop music to become equitable, change it must. “There has been no meaningful and sustained increase in the percentage of artists in nearly a decade,” Smith wrote in this year’s study. We have to do better than that.
[post_title] => Despite big wins at the Grammys, women are vastly underrepresented in pop music
[post_excerpt] => “The fact that women aren’t considered ‘bankable’ means they’re not given the same radio air time as their male counterparts. For every seven male artists on a country playlist, there is only one woman played.”
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[post_date] => 2021-03-05 03:29:33
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[post_content] => We have bought into the false idea that grappling with depression is a solitary journey, but it shouldn't be.
Since 2002 an international activist/artist group called Feel Tank has been staging multidisciplinary events that call attention to the intersection of “bad feelings” (such as depression, despair, hopelessness) and politics. In 2003 Feel Tank Chicago organized an event called the Annual International Parade of the Politically Depressed: a group of academics and artists gathered in a downtown plaza to talk about all the very legitimate reasons they had for feeling dejected about the state of the world. They wore bathrobes to symbolize that they felt “too depressed to get out of bed” and carried signs with slogans like: Depressed? It might be political. It was a type of performance art, explained one member of the group, meant to inspire conversations around the structural forces that contribute to often-individualized depression and create communities based on solidarity and support.
[caption id="attachment_2343" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] Chicago FeelTank Parade of the Politically Depressed on July 25, 2006.[/caption]
A few months ago, I heard about a Feel Tank Toronto event at which the participants sang pop songs, repeating the line "my loneliness is killing me" from “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. This event happened years ago, but I connected to it strongly because loneliness is such a salient aspect of pandemic life during the winter lockdown. The act of singing those lyrics was a means of commenting simultaneously on the irony of mass media teenage heartbreak and on our broken society, with a communal action that created genuine spaces of connection and comfort. Alone in my bedroom, I tried singing the lyrics myself, but my voice sounded tinny in the stillness. Perhaps, I thought, it’s all about the tangential train of thought that arises from such moments. I imagined myself drawn back to Feel Tank’s moment by a delicate thread of dark, saccharine lyrics, which somehow capture the feelings of despair that have reverberated throughout this pandemic year.
My renewed interest in Feel Tank coincided with the release of “Framing Britney Spears,” a New York Times documentary that focuses on the pop star’s struggles with mental illness under the media’s unrelenting, voracious gaze. The film has generated fierce discussions about celebrity and misogyny. Linking it back to Feel Tank broadens the scope of this conversation to the structural politics that influence cultural ideas of mental health, blame, and control.
“Framing Britney Spears” looks at a particularly cruel time in American pop culture, a pre-#metoo era that was characterized by hypocritical and deeply misogynistic standards regarding women’s health, sexuality, femininity, and motherhood. Britney’s rise to fame in the late 1990s coincided with the scandal over Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affair with Monica Lewinsky, then a 23 year-old White House intern. The contrast shone a bright light on American cultural attitudes toward (young) female sexuality, with the media subjecting Monica Lewinsky to blame and shame for what was tacitly presented as her brazen sexuality, while on the other hand expressing puerile interest in whether or not Britney was still a virgin.
The main thread of the documentary deals with a controversial 2008 legal order called a “conservatorship,” whereby a judge ruled that Britney’s mental health issues made her unfit to care for herself or her children and granted her father, Jamie Spears, permanent control of her finances. The terms of the conservatorship are so draconian that they allow Britney’s father to control her freedom of movement and decide who may visit her at home.
Framing Britney Spears traces the efforts of the #FreeBritney movement, a group of fan-activists dedicated to ending the conservatorship; the pop star’s ongoing legal efforts to have her father removed from the conservatorship; and her meteoric rise and fall as a cultural icon during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Much of the commentary on Framing Britney Spears positions the media culture of the early 2000s as having hit a peak in its misogynist treatment of public female figures. Many commentators have pointed to the progress media culture has made since this time, illustrated by the increased openness of celebrities—such as Selina Gomez and Demi Lovato— about their struggles with mental illness. Others have poked holes in this idea by citing a still-persistent culture of body and sex shaming, as seen in attitudes toward young singers like Billie Eilish and Chloe Bailey.
But what if the structures that both spark and lay blame on “bad emotions” and bodies stretch beyond the music industry?
I was drawn to Feel Tank's message of the "political potential of 'bad feelings' like hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, fear, numbness, despair and ambivalence,” because they seek to see these emotions as the product of wider forces, rather than taking on personal blame. This does not mean denying the medical and biological causes of mental illness, but seeing them as intertwined with a series of factors, especially, as Mark Fischer writes in Capitalist Realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
Despair and hopelessness result from a system that demands unrelenting economic, personal, and political progress at the expense of those too mentally unwell, physically different, or racially other to fit within its goals. Feel Tank, which was founded shortly after the Bush administration’s inauguration of “the war on terror,” hosts conferences and exhibitions, holds protests and potlucks. Its participants play games, gossip, and make art. Above all, Feel Tank aims to create spaces for imagining hope. Collectively discussing and sharing “bad feelings” is not about romanticizing sadness, but about questioning societal definitions of happiness.
As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes in her feminist killjoys blog, happiness is often presented as a goal. The one-way path to this happiness is lined with culturally conditioned milestones related to gender (marriage as the happiest moment in one’s life); sexual orientation and race (the American dream: a smiling, white, heterosexual couple with 2.5 kids); and able-ness (mental and physical illnesses as obstacles that are overcome). Ahmed sees the “feminist killjoy” as the one who interjects “but” or “what if”—and the happiness is sucked out of the room. These “buts” come together in the expression of critique and “bad feelings” as a means of creating moments of joy by forging non-linear pathways through life.
Robin James, a philosopher of pop music, connects the forward-moving demands of happiness to female celebrities; she argues that Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s music videos present the singers as role models because they have overcome sorrow and become stronger from the experience. Thus pain, especially heartbreak, is but one more (mile)stone on the way to happiness. Pain is something the resilient leave behind.
In the context of Framing Britney Spears, I can’t help but wonder: how does the film and its resulting media coverage suggest that Britney should move on?
The media coverage of Framing Britney has been characterized by a clear narrative of leaving sadness behind. This includes deriding the early-2000s cultural landscape and seeking to resolve the issue through collective apologies and the laying of individual blame. Many media outlets have said that they are "sorry" for the way they treated Britney, as did Justin Timberlake, who acknowledged that his poor treatment of his once-girlfriend was the expression of his own sexism. Meanwhile, the #FreeBritney fans are certain that their beloved pop star will be free when her legal case is resolved in her favor and the conservatorship is removed.
But while reflection, apologies, and collective action are necessary starting points, they should not be the end of the conversation. Framing Britney underlines this idea of moving on with a clip from a 2008 episode of MTV’s For the Record, in which Britney describes what freedom means for her: “If I wasn’t under the restraints that I’m under right now, you know, with all the lawyers and doctors and people analyzing me every day and all that kind of stuff, I’d feel so liberated and feel like myself…It’s like---it’s bad. And I’m sad.”
I am rooting for the conservatorship to be lifted. But abolishing the cruel legal arrangement will almost certainly not end public scrutiny of Britney Spears. If she wins her legal battle, we should not see her victory as a reason to celebrate the conclusion of Britney’s journey to freedom, but rather to have a serious conversation about the conditions that led to her situation—and how they persist structurally. It means that if her “bad” feelings continue we should not hold them against her, but welcome them.
Britney and her situation feel relevant right now because many of her songs create impossibly sweet and sad spaces to discuss “bad feelings,” the political structures that contribute to them, and “bad choices” other than happiness. Just as Feel Tank and their message of political depression has been debated in relation to rising despair during the pandemic—characterized by loneliness and isolation, but underlined by government failures to provide monetary, social, and mental health support structures—so can this renewed interest in Britney Spears’ mental health present an opportunity to renew this conversation. Perhaps it can spur us to imagine more political possibilities for discussing our pain.
Listening to "Lucky" one day, I thought of a period of deep despair two summers ago. Riding the train, I used to shield my eyes with my hand while crying in public, pretending that I was gazing at something miraculous in the distance. I find myself imagining a lot of such sheltering hands these days, now trailing over computer keyboards in the new reality of emotional life in mostly virtual spaces. Wrist cramping, I bob my head to the beat of Britney’s songs: with loneliness up ahead, emptiness behind, where do I go? Nobody should be alone if they don't have to be.
[post_title] => Reframing Britney Spears: will freedom liberate her from sadness?
[post_excerpt] => "Framing Britney," the New York Times documentary about the pop star's rise and fall, is framed by the belief that once she prevails in her legal battle, she can leave her sadness behind and move forward to a happy life. But this idea that moving on is the desired goal absolves us of a very necessary discussion about the structural problems in our society that led to her situation.
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Chicago FeelTank Parade of the Politically Depressed on July 25, 2006.[/caption]
A few months ago, I heard about a Feel Tank Toronto event at which the participants sang pop songs, repeating the line 