Dec 7, 2009 Features, Interview 3 Comments
Posted by Ezra
Note: The Freedom Fighter series highlights individuals who have been dedicated to music and its power. For the first installment of the series, we sat down with Austin Dacey, philosopher, human rights activist and organizer of “The Impossible Music Sessions”, an upcoming performance series intending to showcase musicians who have been subject to persecution and censorship.
Interview and Words by Ezra Gale, Photos by Quoc Pham
The power of music to incite, liberate, provoke and generally upset the status quo is one that seemingly disparate artists from The Clash to Fela Kuti to Dead Prez have mined for explosive and often political effect. It may be hard for us to picture here in New York and elsewhere in the developed western world- where music is as background as your screen saver- but there are still many places where music is as contraband as dynamite: an uncontrollable substance dangerous to autocratic regimes from Iran to China to Guinea-Bissau who would just as soon banish its potentially subversive effects.
This Wednesday, December 9, marks the start of a performance series at Brooklyn’s Littlefield that aims to showcase banned music from around the globe- music literally declared too dangerous to exist in its home country. Wednesday features Haroon Bacha, forced into exile from his native Pakistan because the encroaching Taliban deemed his lyrics insufficiently puritanical. In 2010 the series will morph into “The Impossible Music Sessions,” a series of performances meant to connect performers here in New York with underground and essentially illegal bands and artists in Iran, Africa and elsewhere. It’s all the brainchild of Austin Dacey, whose vision of combating tyranny includes using music as ammunition, and who has set out to support musicians worldwide doing just that. We sat down to talk with Austin about the upcoming series at Littlefield, and about our favorite subject here at Sound Liberation — the power of music.
So how did you get involved in human rights work, to start?
Well, I’m a philosopher by training, and for the last ten years I’ve worked at doing philosophy in public life. I was working with a non-profit organization that’s interested in freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry. It’s called The Center for Inquiry, and it defends the liberty to doubt and question and dissent from orthodoxy, wherever you are and whoever you are. And that brought me to the United Nations, where we were involved in some of the struggles there to try to protect the human right to doubt and question, and to express those doubts.
And so where along the way did music become involved? How did you decide to incorporate that in what you are doing?
Well, since I was a young man, I was a frustrated musician. I was always looking for a way to get back into music. In the last few years, I was working with dissidents and secular voices from the Arab and Muslim world, and I was finding all this amazing music. The first music I really got into was Persian hip-hop from the underground in Iran, and in the Iranian expatriate community. It was great music and it was obviously an exercise of a human right. People were talking about the situation in their country and opposing a totalitarian theocracy with their music. I started looking around to see if there was anyone talking about the human rights of musicians. I found one organization based in Denmark that had been doing that for about ten years, and so I started volunteering for them.
And are you doing that now, working for them?
Yes, I’m an advisor for Freemuse, the World Forum on Music and Censorship. They’re based in Copenhagen. What Reporters Without Borders is for reporters, Freemuse is for musicians.
That’s interesting, because I bet most people wouldn’t put musicians in the same category as persecuted groups like reporters or dissidents.
Human rights are important because we are all vulnerable to exercises of power. Music is as threatening to the powerful because music has a power to move that is autonomous from the other centers of power in society. It doesn’t respond to command–it responds to its own impulses. Music is also a source of community identity for many religious or cultural minorities who threaten the majority or the orthodox. Music is a convenient target for supressing that pluralism. There are cases of cultural repression, for example, societies where women are not allowed to sing before mixed audiences. Or political censorship, in which certain messages are prevented from getting on state-run radio or television, up to outright bans, where particular songs are considered blasphemous. There are many cases of musicians who have been imprisoned and killed for playing a tune.
Do you think there are repressive regimes that are particularly afraid of music? Do you think there is something about the power of music that makes them want to suppress it?
I think that all totalitarian or autocratic governments are tempted to do that. Probably the worst offender right now is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been called the biggest prison for journalists in the world. It’s a difficult place for any kind of expression, but in particular for so-called western music forms like hip-hop and rock. Music is very tightly controlled by government ministries. Some of the most beloved rock bands and hip-hop artists in Iran have never played a single show in their country because if they did they would almost certainly be harassed or arrested.
The state-run media in China have prevented some Tibetan-language artists from being heard, so that’s another problem area. And the most outrageous repression of music we’ve seen in recent years was under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Yeah, I was going to say, they banned music completely, right?
That’s right. Which they considered any singing, except their own. They have a traditional style of hymns, using tunes borrowed, incidentally, from popular music of the Pashtun ethnic group, from which most of the Taliban come. After the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets and then against the US-led invasion of the country, thousands of these religious extremists have been displaced into northwest Pakistan, where they’ve been regrouping. In fact, this past year they made a bid to take over the region. The first wave of the campaign by the Taliban in northwest Pakistan was an assault on music. And so there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of Pashto, singers, dancers, composers, who were either forced to leave the country or were intimidated by threats of deadly violence.
And so what they ended up with was essentially a world without music? It’s kind of hard for us to imagine I think.
It is hard for us to imagine. Of course, as the manager of Swat Cinema, a movie theater in the Swat Valley, which was the epicenter of this war between Pakistan the Taliban, said to the BBC not long ago, “We also reserve the right to sing, laugh, and to express ourselves.” Even in Afghanistan under the Taliban, drivers would play popular music until they came to a checkpoint, at which point they would stick in a cassette of a Taliban singer wailing away at his hymns. People will find a way to make music. And in fact they have the support of international human rights law in doing so. Music most certainly falls under the kind of expression that’s protected under article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of the things that Freemuse intends to do in coming years is to bring this issue to more attention and begin raising the question of the human rights of musicians within the international community, at the United Nations Human Rights Council and elsewhere.
So tell me a little bit about the Impossible Music Sessions, how did that grow out of this human rights work?
I realized that around the world in places where music is really not fully free, there were these thriving underground scenes, some of which are producing really great stuff. And at the same time in places like New York and San Francisco and Berlin and London and Tokyo there were huge audiences of music lovers, musical youth cultures, and they didn’t know about each other. You know, people in New York who love underground music had no idea about the great underground bands that were playing in Tehran in people’s basements. I thought they would be natural allies, they would be interested in musical relationships, and maybe some community would develop. So I wanted a way to bring together these underground communities that would help get some of this great music out there but also of course raise the profile of these censored artists, hopefully to contribute to the debates within their own societies about pushing the envelope forward for freedom of expression.
And so what’s happening this Wednesday at Littlefield?
We have one of Pakistan’s most beloved Pashto singers, and one of the victims of this Taliban campaign in northwest Pakistan. Haroon Bacha fled the country last year after death threats to him and his family. He was granted asylum in the US and is now looking to re-launch his career here, and has been working with a radio service, an affiliate of Radio Free Europe, broadcasting Pashto language cultural programs back home. He’s going to be playing his own original compositions. It’s these lyrics, he claims, that got him in trouble back. He sings of pluralism, of toleration, of resistance to war, and of the ordinary concerns of people who work, fall in love, and get drunk.
He’ll be performing on the harmonium, which is a beautiful traditional instrument, and he’ll be accompanied by two masters of the tabla and rubab, a lute-like instrument.
Austin Dacey with Haroon Bacha
And in the future you want to showcase more artists like this as well? And maybe even some collaborations with artists who are based here?
The idea for the series is that censored artists will collaborate with artists here, and they will actually perform on behalf of the artists who cannot appear, whose music cannot be played in their homeland. So right now we’re creating some partnerships between hip-hop artists based in New York, and hip-hop artists based in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau who are currently confined to the underground by political violence and threats there. We’re going to be connecting a band here with an underground band in Tehran, and hopefully they can work out some stuff together. We’ll be getting them on the line and talking to them that night, creating an audience for their music here in New York.
Sounds like really a testament to the power of music.
Yes. Music will not be silenced.
Tags: brooklyn, Freedom Fighter Series, Human rights, Interview, Littlefield
