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| FILE - In a Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014 file photo, Eilidh Branson, a student at Spelman College, sings along with a group of protestors at a rally and protest at the CNN Center, in Atlanta, the day after a grand jury's decision not to indict a white Ferguson, Mo., police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. Protest songs are taking their place alongside the chants of “I Can’t Breathe” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” as demonstrators raise their voices to condemn the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police. |
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) -- Stop. Hey, what's that sound? Protest songs are taking their place alongside chants of "I can't breathe" and "Hands up, don't shoot" as demonstrators raise their voices to condemn the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police. There's something happening here.
The
killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown have inspired a musical
outpouring perhaps unseen in the U.S. since Pete Seeger helped make "We
Shall Overcome" a civil-rights standard in the 1960s. Older songs are
being redeployed for a new generation. New compositions are being widely
shared, including some from major-label artists. And holiday classics
are being rewritten, such as a barbed spin on "White Christmas."
"Facts
aren't fueling this fire. Feeling is what is fueling this fire, and
until we express those feelings and those feelings are understood, we
aren't going to get too far," said Daniel Watts, a Broadway performer
who starred in a professionally choreographed Times Square flash mob in
response to Eric Garner's death on Staten Island. He's also written two
more spoken-word pieces about police brutality that others set to music.
One
of the tunes gaining a following on the streets and social media was
penned six weeks ago by Luke Nephew, a 32-year-old Bronx poet who also
has composed event-specific cantos for protests at immigration detention
centers, foreclosure auctions and other demonstration sites. It has
four lines, starting with "I still hear my brother crying, `I can't
breathe.' Now I'm in the struggle singing. I can't leave."
Hundreds
of people sang those words last week as they blocked bridges and got
arrested in New York on the night after a grand jury declined to indict
the white officer who used a chokehold on Garner. That so many knew the
hymn-like song, and the way it has caught on since then, might owe as
much to savvy preparation as the power of the lyrics.
Nephew
first introduced the song at an early November meeting of activists
preparing for the grand jury's decision. The participants agreed to
share it with their members so as many people as possible could join in
when the time came. A recording was posted on YouTube and links made
the rounds on Facebook and Twitter.
"We said,
`Make sure you are taking this back to your organizations. Make sure you
are learning this,'" recalled Jose Lopez, an organizer with the social
service and advocacy group Make the Road New York.
Gospel
singer and radio host Darlene McCoy, founder of a group called Mothers
of Black Sons, heard the protesters in Manhattan singing as she watched
the news at home in Atlanta. She was so taken with the images of people
raising their voices in unison while being handcuffed that she replayed
the broadcast to write down the words.
Unaware
of its origins, McCoy immediately recorded herself singing Nephew's
composition, posted the file on Instagram and challenged other singers
to do the same. At least 45 people have done so, including Catrina
Brooks, a former "The X-Factor" contestant from Michigan, whose
rendition has been viewed nearly 750,000 times.
"The
funny thing is, you have to do it in 15 seconds," McCoy said, referring
to the site's maximum video length. "And that's a challenge for some
artists."
Some protesters find fresh relevance
in popular music of the past - Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" or
Michael Jackson's "They Don't Really Care About Us."
Nephew
is a bit baffled by how seldom contemporary music has been a part of
American social movements in recent decades. He thinks it's partly
because people are no longer accustomed to singing together in public,
partly because younger Americans are turned off by traditional folk and
gospel tunes that do not speak to their experiences.
"It's amazing how much of a vacuum there is," he said. "God bless Pete Seeger. But where is his children's generation?"
Questlove,
drummer for the hip-hop band the Roots, urged fellow musicians via
Instagram and Twitter last week "to be a voice of the times that we live
in," noting that "protest songs don't have to be boring or
non-danceable."
Several professionals have
already released home-produced tribute songs to Brown and Garner,
including Alicia Keys, Long Beach rapper Crooked I, Rage Against the
Machine guitarist Tom Morelo and hip-hop producer J. Cole.
Amateurs
have gotten into the act too. A group in St. Louis disrupted a symphony
performance of Brahms' Requiem by singing a "Requiem for Mike Brown"
and scattering confetti hearts from the balcony.
Other
protests adopt a seasonal theme with "justice carols" that reimagine
holiday classics - "All I Want for Christmas Is An Indictment" and "O
Little Town of Ferguson."
But whether any of
the songs come to crystallize recent events in the way Buffalo
Springfield's "For What It's Worth" came to symbolize the Vietnam War
era, well, it ain't exactly clear.
"It often
takes time for ideas to percolate through and for people to step back
and take a breath and write meaningful tunes," said Ian Peddie, an
English professor at Georgia Gwinnett College who studies the
intersection of popular music and human rights. "There has to be that
period of incubation."
