Music

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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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‘Patria y Vida’: the Cuban song that has become a global rallying cry

by Elena Sheppard

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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.
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Despite big wins at the Grammys, women are vastly underrepresented in pop music

by Elena Sheppard

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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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Reframing Britney Spears: will freedom liberate her from sadness?

by Rachel Pafe

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