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Fight Music: Documentary Style Mix Encapsulates The Times
Couchsessions.com contributor, Dominic Painter aka DJ d.painter, has released a new "docu-mix-tape", Fight Music 2: White Man's Burden, with accompanying literature that diagnoses a segment of the American population and how their situations, beliefs and prejudices influenced the 2016 election. With local races becoming Nationally focused battle grounds between Red and Blue (Alabama for instance), this mix is timely as we enter into 2018 and the pending campaigns ahead.
Below is a synopsis of the project written by d.painter. Stream the mix here or download.
Check out the full "liner notes" (lyrics, context of each song and soundbite, etc.) here.
Also, Fight Music: Pedagogy Of The Oppressed is a 2016 hip-hop mix you can stream here.
It's been a full year since the election, since “The Resistance" began, since wokeness spread like a virus. In the wake of an upset, democrats struggle to find a message while many of Trump's fringe supporters are having buyer’s remorse. 2018 is up for grabs and it's important to reflect on the feelings, ideologies and motivations of the citizens that got us where we ended up in 2017.
Focused on the voices most representative of the people, speeches and interviews are layered with songs indicative of the feelings, opinions and situations experienced by many US citizens. The songs, some dating back to the 1950's, demonstrate that issues are never fully solved, just quelled temporarily as public opinion cycles around, not unlike fashion and art.
The title, “White Man’s Burden”, is taken from an 1899 poem by celebrated author Rudyard Kipling. The original piece is about how it is the moral obligation of the west (Britain and the US) to colonize the more uncivilized regions of the world. It is now clear that the virtue of Eurocentricity is a fallacy in that it does not uplift the “uncivilized”, it has historically conformed them mostly for the sake of labor and servitude. What we are seeing now is a societal regression in which Eurocentrism has imploded on its own people. Industrialization, once considered the saving grace of society and the heart of 20th Century middle class development, has all but vanished stateside. With less domestic outlets for upward mobility, more and more White Americans find themselves in a position not far removed from those colonized people the western world once exploited for financial dominance. The white man & woman's burden is now fighting to not be victims, crushed under the weight of their own system.
This project is split into 4 Chapters where a mix of punk (Rise Against, The Clash, Bikini Kill, Green Day, etc), heartland rock (Neil Young, John Mellencamp) and country (Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, etc) artists tell the story.
