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In keeping with his activist turn on 2016’s 4 Your Eyez Only, J. Cole’s new album, KOD, is an exploration of addiction. The title has three different meanings that all speak to this aim: Kids On Drugs, King OverDosed, and Kill Our Demons. Each feeds into the next in this narcotic odyssey.
The new wave of hip-hop has arisen a woke generation. From it, Xiuhtezcatl — seventeen-year-old Indigenous rapper and activist — has emerged, stirring the comatose with his music.
From performing at the Standing Rock encampment with Immortal Technique and Nahko to leading the Youth v. Gov. lawsuit against the Federal Government, Xiuhtezcatl’s actions show his music is more than words.
In Halt, a new solo piece premiered at
NYU Gallatin, dancer and choreographer
Jamar Roberts examined the language of
the body in protest. The work focuses
on what it means for human beings-the
committed individual and the organized
collective- to be equally the subjects
of progressive change and the targets
of unjust corporeal punishment.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.
See below for a link to the performance of the song at the Academy Awards.
From Salon: How Common and John Legend’s performance of “Glory” fired up Oscar night’s idling empathy machine by Sonia Saraiya
Fespaco is a meeting place put to good use to promote the development of black cinematography. From 1973, topics of discussion are introduced at each edition.
Alley Cat Books, located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, is ordinarily a quiet space for book lovers to peruse multicolored shelves for their next literary adventure. But on Sunday, the small bookstore buzzed with energy as a group of leggings-clad Bay Area residents protested Donald Trump's presidency in the form of a sweaty cardio workout.
As the No. 59 bus hurtled down Ratchadamnoen Klang road in Bangkok's Old Town, its passengers diverted their attention from the intense midday heat to a small crowd on the concrete below. About 25 people were marching and chanting, photographers scuttling in front of them.
Caucus-goers in Des Moines will arrive to a disturbing sight on Monday, with dozens of chain-link cages appearing to hold migrant children cropping up across the city overnight.
On September 27, 2022, a song by Iranian musician Shervin Hajipour ‘broke’ Persian social media. Hajipour posted a video on Instagram of himself singing a song for the mass protests that began in Iran following the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. Its lyrics were composed of tweets from members of the Iranian Twittersphere explaining what the protests meant to them, what they were fighting for and what was at stake with the hashtag #برای (for the sake of).
Thousand Kites, a nonprofit organization based in the Appalachian region, advocates for prison reform through performance.The following excerpt is directly quoted from the Thousand Kites website: "Starting 1998, as host of the rural, Appalachian region's only hip-hop
radio program "Lights Out," Thousand Kites media artist Nick Szuberla
received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred from distant
To honor their battle, Lebanese women's rights organization ABAAD launched a powerful song and music video titled Not Your Honor. The clip was launched on the occasion of the "16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence" initiative which took off on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Founded by Frankie Hutchinson, Emma Burgess-Olson and Christine Tran, Discwoman is a New York-based platform, collective, and booking agency—representing and showcasing cis women, trans women and genderqueer talent in electronic music. Started as a two-day festival in September 2014 at Bossa Nova Civic Club Discwoman has since produced and curated events in 15+ cities—working with over 150 DJs and producers to-date.
In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”
You could hear their chants from the White House.
On June 6, hundreds of activists and protesters gathered on Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block section on 16th Street in Washington D.C. that was renamed amid BLM protests.
Rapper Logic's song "1-800-273-8255" may have helped prevent a significant number of suicides around the time of its release, according to a study published Monday.
Late last year, the New York Times published an op-ed short film written and narrated by Jay Z. The clip was called “The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail,” and that kind of title was explicit enough for everyone to grasp the entertainment mogul’s general argument, whether they knew anything about drug war or not.
The Propaganda Machine is a battle cry delivered in the language of extreme metal. On Sahil Makhija’s fourth solo album as Demonstealer, he takes aim at the right-wing politicians, racist nationalists, disinformation artists, and religious extremists who manipulate and exploit the masses, in his native India and all over the world. He doesn’t mince his words; just about every lyric on the album could easily be printed on a protest sign.
Renowned French artist JR and Oscar-nominated American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky have collaborated on The Standing March, a major public artwork exhibited in Paris during the UN’s COP21 climate conference. The video projection will remind leaders that the world is watching as they gather to negotiate a deal aimed at keeping global warming below 2°C.
Emel Mathlouthi (Arabic: آمال المثلوثي) is a Tunisian singer-songwriter best known for her protest songs "Ya Tounes Ya Meskina" (Poor Tunisia) and "Kelmti Horra" (My Word is Free) which became anthems for the Tunisian revolution and the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Jay-Z rapped alongside side Bono, the Edge and Rihanna; Coldplay's Chris Martin moonlighted as Beyoncé's piano player; Justin Timberlake covered Leonard Cohen — and those performances, from January 22nd's multinetwork, $66 million-grossing telethon for Haitian earthquake victims, were just the most visible of musicians' efforts to raise funds.