A Protest Playlist
Posted by unbrand on 22 March 2003 | 0 Comments
Because I’m fortunate enough to live in San Francisco, I’ve gone to several large and inspiring anti-war protests here in the “Baghdad By the Bay.” Of course, that term can now mean any number of things, but that’s a different point entirely.
So I’m thinking about all that’s going on in the protests and getting pumped up, frustrated, and generally anxious at the prospect of PeaceWar and regime change in the U.S., but then I’m left with the feeling of “What can I do?” I can talk to people who may only believe what corporate media tell them. I can (well, mostly, Sibylle can) take pictures, I can distribute homemade flyers, I can attend rallies. I can read and post on websites like Democratic Underground and WhatReallyHappened. I can have some t-shirts and stickers printed up.
I can create a protest playlist. I use iTunes/AAC to listen to music, so unfortunately, I don’t have this info in .pls format, but I’ve exported the playlist into xml:
iTunes XML version of playlist
In college, I’d make mix tapes for parties. It was a lot of fun, and you could get really creative with content themes, lame-ass attempts at beat-matching, putting George Carlin quotes in between songs, etc. For this playlist, though, there was only 1 criteria: songs about protest. These songs are all songs that I’ve liked for various reasons in the past, but in the context of what’s going on now in the world, these songs have taken on new meaning. They cut to the bone of American democracy/capitalism, foreign policy, minority culture, war, TV, and all kinds of other truths that you simply cannot easily get elsewhere.