Remix my music, please.
March 15, 2012 4:35 PM Subscribe
Sarah Fimm wants to inspire people to use their creative talents to promote human rights. To that end, she's encouraging people to take portions of her and fellow artists' works
Everything Becomes Whole" - music, lyrics,
images and music
video - to create new presentations focusing attention on ending slavery.
In this age of
fair use hyper concern and monitoring of the sharing of artists works by the RIAA and record labels, to have an artist actively asking people to "Download the raw stems and build your own remix" is refreshing. I've found
some examples of others permitting it, but am not aware of other artists using it as a form of promoting a cause.
Sarah's grandmother is a survivor of the holocaust, which may explain her personal interest in INSPIRE, her new effort to promote awareness and action against slavery. She is working with photographer
Heyrik Chasse and videographer
Erik Montovano.
posted by grimjeer (18 comments total)
11 users marked this as a favorite
I feel like stuff like this represents a horrible nadir of consumerism and identity politics - where individual choices and individual actions matter most of all, a kind of hyper-real where believing or feeling something is as real as doing something.
The arrogant, simplistic and crushingly naive preamble to the website only confirms this for me. (Slavery is real. This site is a for inspiring all minds to take a moment to consider that as long as we live in a world where slavery is permitted, no one is free. This site is meant to serve as a beacon to all those who want to help end slavery in our world today. This is a place to engage and use your voice right now to change history. )
Posting on Facebook how much you hate slavery is not action. Some dude in Mali neither knows nor gives a fuck that you wrote a song about how bad slavery is. Neither does the pimp in Houston.
I assume that most people I meet are down on slavery, think people with cancer deserve support, don't want to encourage massacres or whatever the freak thing is doing the rounds this week. Liking or disliking a thing - both literally and figuratively - is not the same as engaging with it. Buying something to express your like/dislike more fully is usually not, either.
I hate this cultural thing, where people are incapable or uninterested in engaging with the world, outside of themselves. Political action becomes something that can only be achieved through individual expression - not even individual action. "I hate Whatever, and you should, too." It's a noxious, horrible, effective and efficient PR trick. If you really give a fucking shit about slavery - beyond clicking on a link or writing a song about it - you need to be engaging with it; "I hate slavery, so I donate my time to such and such to oppose it in country X, give money to fund Y which focuses on supporting victims of sex trafficking, wrote to my local politician about it, and submitted my response to a senate inquiry on the matter." But that second part - the action part - gets dropped off this stuff. I hate slavery, is a motivation; it's the start, not the end.
This, this isn't even about slavery. It's about Slavery. As if that dude in Mali and pimp in Houston have anything in common. The things that led them to thinking that what they're doing is okay, and the forces that enabled them to hold slaves are - entirely - different. They are complex, multifarious, cultural, economic, social and more. There certainly isn't a "solution"; there may not even be solutions, certainly there are no easy ones.
And yet, movements like this are happy to outsource the thinking. A mouth-agape kind of response that is currently giving us the special-interest-beholden governments we deserve the world over. It's enough that I, Joe and Jane public, am against something. I'll outsource the thinking to the govt, that's what they're meant to do. I don't need to understand something to hate it! And I certainly don't need to understand it to do something about it, heck no!
Forgive me, I'm starting to sound like Faze. But shit like this just gets my back right up. It marginalises both the actual victims of these situations, our own culpability in creating maintaining the circumstances for their exploitation, and the actual work - stretching back centuries in this case - of the people trying to change things. Don't know their names? That's because the problem is bigger than them and personal brand, and they know it.
It reduces complex problems to simplistic fairy-tales, with equally simplistic solutions that are easily chewed, digested, then ejected by the public in search of the next empathy Happymeal they can find. It also leads to resentment and frustration about lack of action, lack of caring, and ultimately a kind of inertial helplessness, wherein people feel that they've "already done their part".
It's so self-centered and inward-looking. Yes, there is a lot history of protest movements and song - but those songs were a product of movements, not movements in themselves.
Change comes from action - political action. "Liking" is not a substitute. Singing a song for all the other people that care about it, is not political action. Acting like slavery needs a "lighthouse" is not action. You can't "use your voice right now to change history" if you're just talking to yourself. Complex problems, complex solutions. It sucks, but the sooner we as a society fundamentally understand this, the sooner we can really accomplish things.
posted by smoke at 6:10 PM on March 15, 2012 [49 favorites]