Bringing Down the Walls - A Tribute to Black Music (Necessary)
Last week, I couldn’t stop playing a house edit of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues”, a song originally written “to highlight the ghettos of the time and the bleak economic situations of inner-city America, and the emotional effects these have on inhabitants”. The lyric that continued to stand out in my mind was “trigger happy policing”. It became astonishing to me that black people have been bringing this issue to our ears for over 50 years, and we collectively have failed to listen.
We made this mix at Twilight to celebrate black music and black voices. I think we all know that music culture would be nothing without the contributions from black artists. The mix aims to find the common ground between the many disparate eras and genres of music that speak to the resilience of black culture. We also wanted to use this music as a reminder of the importance of joy in any fight for social justice and the power of dance as an act of resistance and freedom.
The mix includes music and words from: Gil Scot Heron, Marvin Gaye, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Larry Heard, Robert Owens, Childish Gambino, Beyonce, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Moodyman, Bill Withers, Biggie Smalls, Killer Mike, Nina Simone and more.
We at Twilight Transmissions and XRay stand unequivocally with the Black Lives Matter movement. May this music offer a slight respite from the battle for racial justice, and hopefully charge you for the continued fight ahead. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we have a long way to go.
https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/ExpressDonation.aspx?ORGID2=931059146