Music

January 6, 2020January 8, 2020

President of the Declining US Empire

President

Don’t look back, you’re being followed,
on your permanent vacation,
you scowl on every TV screen,
your fantasies divide the nations.
You feed my fear, you make it real,
no freedom in your loaded gun,
tell your old white boys, Donny,
there is nowhere left to run.

The world’s on fire, you let it burn,
fan the flames, there’s no return,
You want it all,
there’s more to learn.

In the silence of the fiery desert
grows a flower, blinding white,
don’t talk to me of limited war,
the battle’s lost on foreign ground.
Shadow boxing in the global village,
watch the old men take their bows,
While everyone awaits your fall
You build a wall to end all walls.

The world’s on fire, you let it burn,
fan the flames, no return,
you want it all,
there’s more to learn.

Lyrics of my song from 1989 are now updated to encompass Trump’s current opportunistic aggression toward Iran, as the archvillain baits and switches public attention away from the impeachment proceedings against him and feeds the fear of the public. When the racist, violent right press the fear button, they are ensuring people vote for the status quo. Works every time.

“I’m really sorry we are living in a world where the president of the biggest so-called superpower still doesn’t know attacking cultural sites is a war crime.” says Iran’s FM Mousavi. Yet since when does Amerikkka care about international law or being held accountable for its copious war crimes? Instead, its past warmongering criminal Presidents are sanitized and sanctified. When you are an empire with full spectrum global dominance, you never have to say you’re sorry for your crimes.

The US Beast serially chooses its scapegoats, playing the old imperial game of balancing the resource-rich Middle East between complete chaos and stability, in order to control oil prices and exercise manifest destiny-fueled imperial prerogative over its bounty, ensuring local dictatorial ruling class hegemony obedient to the US remains to oppress the people and commandeer the profits, with the usual weapons testing on live targets and consequent massive tithes of weapons purchases from the greedy empire and its western cronies, not to mention insuring the continuance of the obscene Pentagon budget, the most significant US economic ‘stimulus’.

Thus, with Syria no longer the focus, it’s Iran’s turn as lead whipping boy once more. This time, may the whole region and indeed, the whole world, unite to expel the imperial Beast and end the gruesome, planet-destroying, warmongering Amerikkkan occupation.

Natalie Imbruglia, Please Don’t Make a Big Mistake

Dear Natalie,

We are writing to you to ask you to please reconsider your performance in Israel, scheduled for the 1st March, 2017. We understand this will be your first appearance in Israel and would like to inform you that playing there will be in breach of the Palestinian call for artists to respect the cultural boycott of Israel until it adheres to international law and Palestinians have their civil and political rights which they are currently denied by the apartheid Israeli government. [1]

Like Aboriginal people in Australia before 1966, indigenous Palestinians who live in Israel are prevented from enjoying full citizenship in that state. Full citizenship is available only on theocratic grounds, to people who are defined as Jewish by the State. Furthermore, Palestinians in Israel are subject to more than 50 laws discriminating against them – de facto apartheid. Palestinians who reside in the Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza which Israel seized and occupied in 1967 cannot vote at all in Israeli elections. These Palestinian people subsist in segregated bantustans isolated from each other by apartheid walls and fences with their movement controlled by over 500 checkpoints, preventing them from attending universities and hospitals, and seeing friends and relatives – many families have been separated for years due to this system of apartheid. Indeed the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s apartheid wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory illegal in 2004 – further international law that it ignores.

Palestinians persecuted by military occupation naturally wish to live freely with rights in their own ancestral lands. However, illegal Israeli settlements continually expand and encroach upon those lands, despite several United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. Most recently, on 23 December 2016, the UNSC passed another resolution unanimously against expansion of the illegal settlements, and again affirmed their illegality under international law, yet Israel refuses to recognise these resolutions. Israel has now declared de facto war on the resolution’s sponsors, including New Zealand [2] and also intends to withhold UN dues [3]. Since the resolution Israel has accelerated its demolition of Palestinian homes to four times its 2016 weekly average, making hundreds of people homeless.

Nearly 800,000 Jewish people now reside illegally on Palestinian lands, enjoying full political rights while Palestinians languish, brutalised by military occupation and without rights. Palestinian refugees driven out in the 1948 Nakba from the areas which Israel claimed comprise the second largest refugee population in the world and again, despite the requirements of international law, Israel refuses to permit these Indigenous people to return to their homes. In many countries Palestinians are stateless, living in squalid refugee camps for decades, never giving up hope that their right of return will be realised and they can return to their Indigenous home and heritage which has been usurped and colonised.

Zionist colonisation of Palestine follows a similar trajectory to British colonisation of Australia, where Indigenous Australians were forced into isolating missions and reserves, slaughtered and dispossessed of their land and culture, while Palestinians too are subjected to extreme violence and forced into refugee camps and bantustans We understand you have experienced the end results of these genocidal colonial crimes during your participation in the First Contact SBS programme and are sympathetic to the plight of Aboriginal people in Australia consequent to white colonisation. We ask you to consider also the distressing situation for Palestinian people and the importance of support for their struggle for liberation and justice. Because the international political community has refused to act to support their rights, Palestinians called in 2005 for cultural boycott and asked people of conscience like yourself for solidarity with their movement by refraining from performing in Israel.

By respecting their call, you will also be supporting the women of Gaza who suffer from breast cancer, another area where you have shown empathy. Israel prevents breast cancer sufferers, and indeed most cancer sufferers from obtaining appropriate treatment, due to its collective punishment of two million civilians which it has incarcerated in the largest prison in the world – Gaza – since 2006.

“Dozens of female cancer patients in the Gaza Strip have launched a protest against Israel’s refusal to allow them to cross into Israel to seek medical treatments in hospitals in Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The women say the ban or delay of their treatments is a “premeditated death sentence.” [4]

Due to Israel’s military attacks on Gaza and its illegal, immoral siege which prevents the import of fuel supply and parts, sickness is common there since the water supply is contaminated by dysfunctional sewerage treatment plants and electricity supply is currently down to a mere four hours per day [5]. Physicians for Human Rights comments on Israel’s deprivation of medical equipment:

“There are no syringes, no bandages and no tubes. When one of our surgeons asks for a specific scalpel or bandage during surgery he’s told that there aren’t any available. When we train a local doctor and teach him techniques and procedures he has nothing to work with.” [Ibid.]

The UN has estimated that without major reconstruction, Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020. [Ibid.] Should you play your concert in Israel, be aware that this crime against humanity is being perpetrated just miles from you.

Certainly, Israel will continue to carry out its injustices against the Palestinian people if we are silent and do not act. We implore you to recognise your performance in Israel cannot create bridges over apartheid, oppression and suffering, merely obscure it so Israel can continue to pretend that its crimes are “normal” and blame Palestinians for their own plight. This is clearly not the case any more than the myth proliferated by white supremacists that Aboriginal people in Australia are responsible for their own immiseration.

The reality is that for Israel any show that isn’t cancelled because of boycott appeals is considered a political victory over the Palestinian struggle and international solidarity with it. Performing in Tel Aviv means playing for a segregated audience, on ethnically cleansed land. We really hope you can’t see yourself doing this and you join Lauryn Hill, Cassandra Wilson, Sinead O’Connor, Cat Power, Massive Attack and thousands of other artists who have refused to play in Israel – in Ireland over 540 artists have pledged to boycott the state, as have over 1,190 in the UK, and many more all over the world.

Please respect the Palestinian call to boycott Israel – you can make a real difference here and help tip the moral scales toward justice.

DPAI

We are a group, of over 2000 members from many nations around the globe, who believe that it is essential for musicians & other artists to heed the call of the PACBI, and join in the boycott of Israel. This is essential in order to work towards justice for the Palestinian people under occupation, and also in refugee camps and in the diaspora throughout the world.

Palestine Support Network Australia (PSNA)
Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA)
Australian Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions Campaign for Palestine (BDS)
Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (CJPP)
Sydney Staff for BDS
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

Samah Sabawi, Palestinian Australian playwright and Al Shabaka policy adviser
Kollaps, Melbourne band
Candy Royalle, Writer, Performer, Activist, Educator
Amy McQuire, Indigenous Writer
Penelope Swales, Musician
Sara Dowse, Writer
Trish Nacey, Videographer and Musician
Walbira Murray, Indigenous Research Officer
Ken Canning, Indigenous Playwright
Jeff Sparrow, Writer, Editor and Broadcaster
Marcelo Svirsky, Writer

Notes:

December 26, 2016December 11, 2020

Salute to the Alexandrov Ensemble

The devastating loss of 64 choristers, orchestra members and dancers from the Alexandrov Ensemble as well as 9 journalists in a tragic plane crash over the Black Sea reverberates its shock back to my early years. The first time I heard the Internationale, it was sung by the Red Army Choir, the precursor of the Alexandrov Ensemble, on a record of my dad’s. Being a bass singer and chorister himself, my father found the rich timbre and brilliance of the Red Army Choir irresistible.

As a confirmed voter for the Australian Labor Party whom Lenin had described accurately and disparagingly in 1913 as “a liberal-bourgeois party”, my father would not have appreciated perhaps the sentiments expressed in the USSR official anthem, though he loved the passionate Slavic feel of the music. Few things would bring a tear to his stolid Scottish eye, yet this rendition was one.

Somewhere packed away, this record still survives, along with those he brought back from South Africa during the apartheid years, like “Wait a Minim!”

Here’s the Red Army Choir in 1993 with the Leningrad Cowboys in Helsinki performing Rolling Stones and many other covers.

And more recently, the Alexandrov Ensemble performed a “heppy” version of “Happy”!

Predictably, bloodthirsty apologists for AQ/Nusra/JFS and affiliates (who in concert with depraved patriarchal oppression of women regard music as “wicked and immoral“) and other obfuscators of US/GCC/NATO contras’ belligerence gloat at the deaths of Russia’s iconic musos.

https://twitter.com/brooklynjnoubi/status/813085293490405376

https://www.facebook.com/TheMathDoctor/posts/10154748284605772

https://twitter.com/ramahkudaimi/status/812922894074466304

The enemies of music are enemies of their own humanity.

December 7, 2015March 17, 2017

The Imperial Bourgeois Rag

Hieronymus Bosch- - '"A Violent Forcing Of The Frog." — Hieronymus Bosch – ‘”A Violent Forcing Of The Frog.”

My principles are lofty,
my politics so cool,
and if you dare to disagree,
I’ll push you in the pool.

I follow only brightest bulbs
who shine the truth for me,
and if you don’t embrace them too,
I’ll string you up a tree.

Ch:
Black and white,
left and right,
walk in bourgeois footsteps
or vanish in the night.

You insignificant naive prawn,
you’re at my beck and call
and if you don’t worship me
I’ll eat you, tail and all.

There’s only one way to look at this
despise me if you must,
and if you fail to follow me
I’ll throw you under the bus.

December 2015.

Partly inspired probably years ago by Red Gum’s classic “Beaumont Rag”

October 18, 2014December 11, 2020

A Ballad for the Grabbit – Tony Silvertongue

TONY SILVERTONGUE

Do not denigrate our P M
He leads this fair and precious land
And speaks his mind into the ether
Maybe sometimes he leaves his teeth there!

Do not denigrate or call him names
Like Phoney Tony, Flash or James
For princely ears deserve respect
Yet growing debt is what we get.

Chorus
O Tony who art thou that leads us
Can we trust thy tongue to please us
Can we trust thy silver tongue
Oft times the laird, oft times the merde!

In shiny lycra, dashing knight
Keeping fit in skinny tights
You are our hero of the day
Please make the bad things go away!

Do not denigrate our Prime Minister
Or rhyme Abbott with Grabbit – it’s too sinister
Ruling the unruly mob
He may be the best man for the job …..
Tony Abbott may be God!

Chorus
O Tony who art thou that leads us
Can we trust thy tongue to please us
Can we trust thy silver tongue
Now the journey has begun.

Category: Music