It started as an experiment: what happens when you equip a vibrant youth community with the resources to express themselves through hip hop and electronic music? Last summer I traveled to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo to find out and the results were more beautiful than I could have imagined.
There is a large Filipino community in the Bay Area that organizes and fights for better workers’ rights and educating youth of color. There are groups within this community that address these issues through hip-hop.
Kiwi Illafonte, 40, is a Bay Area political rapper who talks about social issues in his music.
“Social change is at the center of my universe,” Illafonte said.
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.
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).
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
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.
“Baraye,” the anthem of Iran’s “Woman, Life, Liberty” protest movement—a song woven together entirely from a Twitter hashtag trend in which Iranians express their investment in the current protests—continues to unite Iranians in their opposition to the Islamic Republic several weeks after it was first released online.
Zubair Magray, who goes by the stage name Haze Kay, raps about the conflict in Indian-administered Kashmir. The 23-year-old, one of the first rappers to emerge from the valley, blames the Indian military for "ruining" his homeland.
The Comfort Illusion is a solo aural performance that highlights the effects our everyday actions can have on the environment. Through mixed media storytelling using sound and lighting, Adams narrates the life of "The Overkiller" a fictional villian who negatively impacts the earth and the lives of the people around him through smaller everyday decisions. This character constantly prioritizes convenience over care and responsibility (ie.
Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls is a non-profit music and mentoring program that empowers girls and women through music education, volunteerism, and activities that foster self-respect, leadership skills, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has teamed up with UK band The 1975 to record a song in she calls for mass civil disobedience to force action on greenhouse gas emissions.
In the track, titled “The 1975,” Thunberg recites an essay over ambient music, urging listeners to join a popular rebellion against climate change.
“Everything needs to change. And it has to start today,” she says in the song, released July 24.
China's underground hiphop became an art movement since early 2000s. With characteristics of self-expression, localization and social criticism, Chinese hip hop music quickly gained popularity among students and working-class Chinese. Some notable music groups from Beijing include Yin Ts'ang (隐藏) and In3er (阴三儿).
As part of USAID's "My Comunidad-Mi Agua" program in Peru, "Pamparadio" was a radio show run by two adolescents from the community of Iquitos, a jungle province. Armed with a gigantic speaker on the top of a community center and an AM radio frequency, Marco Jhastin Anchec and Cledy del Aguila Mozombite single-handedly ran "Pamparadio" as a celebration of potable water, how to make it, and how to take care of it.
Resonate, Reverberate, Roar (Re-Re-Roar) is a growing archive of original sounds that express an experimental, independent, and socially progressive spirit. The sounds on Re-Re-Roar include field recordings, interviews, songs, speeches, experimental music, and more. Re-Re-Roar is a site for research and activ[ist] listening, with the purpose of distributing sounds of resistance to eager ears around the globe.
Demonstrators aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement sang their way into handcuffs during a Bronx foreclosure auction Monday to protest the housing crisis that continues to plague the borough.
They serenaded a courtroom of real estate investors with the lyrics, "Y'all are speculating off people's pain. With all due respect, you should be ashamed."
You get a flat tire. You fail a test. You lose a job. You lose a relationship. It’s so easy to let the struggles of life consume and affect the way we think and react. Broadly, negativity is something that everyone is faced with on a day to day basis. It comes in many forms, and everyone deals with it differently. It seems as though negativity can make it difficult to acknowledge any positive aspect of any situation.
Female Frequency is a collective dedicated to empowering women & girls through the creation of music that is entirely female generated. "We are making an album created entirely by females, start to finish --
this means that all writing, instrumentation, arrangement, performance, production, engineering, mixing, mastering, marketing and visual media will be carried out by females."
It was a long time coming - but it was worth the wait.
Nearly two years ago, more than a dozen of Mexico’s biggest performing artists came together in a mega-event aimed at saving Wirikuta, one of the country’s most sacred sites, from devastation at the hands of Canadian gold and silver mining operations.
For artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a "ghost." The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.
"Send It On" is a song recorded by American recording artists Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez from charity project Disney's Friends for Change. The track's producers Adam Anders and Peer Åström co-wrote it with Nikki Hassman. The song was released on August 11, 2009 by Walt Disney and Hollywood Records as a charity single in order to benefit international environmental associations.
Before Chance the Rapper performed at sold-out concert venues, he practiced his rhymes in front of an intimate crowd of roughly a dozen people at Harold Washington Library. Now the rapper is trying to return the favor, one open mic at a time.
A technological feat has emerged amid the Chilean protests. A video of protestors bringing down a police drone has gone viral on social media sites. These protestors didn't use any physical or gun force to bring the drone down. Instead, they used another form of technology: lasers. A lot of bright green laser beams were pointed in unison at the drone, which can be seen moving erratically, before quickly falling down to Earth.
The duo Libia Castro (b. 1970) & Ólafur Ólafsson (b. 1973) are the recipients of the Art Prize 2021 for their collective performance with the Magic Team In Search of Magic - A Proposal for a New Constitution for The Republic of Iceland.