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music
Joni Mitchell: 'F*ck Donald Trump!'
"This is an important one," Mitchell said of the U.S. election. "I wish I could vote—I'm Canadian."
Oct 21, 2024
With 17 days to go until Election Day in the United States, folk music icon Joni Mitchell told 17,000 people assembled at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles how she feels about the Republican presidential candidate.
"Fuck Donald Trump," said the singer and songwriter at her three-hour concert on Saturday night.
Mitchell drew applause with the remark, which followed her performance of "Dog Eat Dog," a 1985 song she hadn't performed publicly since the year it was released.
The political song includes the lyrics, "The white washed hawks peddle hate and call it love," "Where the wealth's displayed / thieves and sycophants parade," and the refrain, "Holy hope in the hands of / snakebite evangelists and racketeers / and big wig financiers."
To the latter line, Mitchell ad-libbed the words, "Like Donald Trump!"
Mitchell called on audience members to ensure they vote in the election. Early voting has started in California and a number of other states including Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota.
"This is an important one," Mitchell said. "I wish I could vote—I'm Canadian."
She then made a reference to Trump's yearslong attacks on immigrants, whom he has long accused of being disproportionately likely to commit crimes—a claim that is not supported by facts—and has said he would subject to mass deportation if he wins the election.
"I'm one of those lousy immigrants," Mitchell said, prompting laughter from the audience.
Mitchell has weighed in on political issues since launching her music career in the 1960s. She has written songs protesting wars including the Vietnam War, environmental destruction, and attacks on women's rights and autonomy.
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Sinead O’Connor’s Life and Legacy of Protest
Once an abused child, she stood up against the oppression of others, from children abused by Catholic priests to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Jul 28, 2023
Tragically, Sinead O’Connor is dead at 56. Many of the obituaries of Irish protest singer have been oddly thin, and have ignored key moments in her life. One was her contretemps with Israeli extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the country’s Minister of National Security. She later became fiercely critical of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Another was her conversion to Islam in 2018.
O’Connor maintained to Dr. Phil that she was an abused child, the victim of her mother, Johanna O’Grady: “She ran a torture chamber. My earliest memory, she’s telling me I shouldn’t have been born. She didn’t want me… She was a person who took delight, would smile in hurting you.”
She ran away from home when she was 13. She was later caught shoplifting and had to spend eight months in a home for fallen women, which she remembered as a horrific experience. When she was 18 her mother died in a car accident, leaving Sinead forever unable to work through that difficult relationship, which haunted her.
Dylan inspired her to take up music. She came to prominence with her 1987 punk-rock hit in the UK, “Mandinka.”
She was becoming a pop star, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She said she was a punk, a protest singer.
Her breakout song was a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares to U” in 1990, a song about the depth of loss, in which she genuinely wept at the end of the video. Tom Eames explains that it stayed at the top of the US charts for four weeks in 1990.
She was becoming a pop star, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She said she was a punk, a protest singer. She insisted on shocking her fans. Issy Ronald explains that as an abused child herself, she was sensitive to the stories in the back pages of the Irish newspapers on victims of priest child abuse, and grew more and more furious about it. When she was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she sang Bob Marley’s “War” a capella, and ended by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul, whom she blamed for having declined to confront the pedophilia crisis in the Church. She shouted “Fight the real enemy!”
I remember watching that performance and wondering what in the world was going on. I didn’t become aware of the priest pedophilia issue until much later.
Ironically, Ms. O’Connor wrote in her memoir, Rememberings, that she probably became a musician because, as a woman, she was barred from becoming a priest. Her spiritual yearning, visible throughout her life, was not squelched by the patriarchy and abuse of major religious institutions. She continued to seek the transcendent truth, but outside such frameworks.
She battled her own demons, including bipolar disorder, and had difficulty maintaining lasting relationships. She was a deeply lonely person who kept seeking intimacy and failing to find it. She had four failed marriages, one lasting just a week.
As someone who felt oppressed herself, she sympathized with both the Jews and the Palestinians. Daniel Hilton at Middle East Eyeexplains that she agreed to do a concert in Jerusalem in 1997 for a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who were campaigning for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of Israel and Palestine. This was when the Oslo Peace Accords had created an expectation that there would be a Palestinian state, before far right Likud politician Binyamin Netanyahu derailed the agreement.
An Israeli extremist group, the Ideological Front, made death threats against Ms. O’Connor, who cancelled the concert. One of the activists threatening to kill her was Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom Netanyahu made minister of national security this winter. Ben-Gvir boasted, “Due to us she is not arriving.” He added, “We are calling the pressure we put on her… a success,” according to AP at the time. As always, Ben-Gvir and his fellow violent extremists were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They delivered the death threat to the British embassy. Ms. O’Connor was Irish.
She then wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir, her would-be murderer. She said, “God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world, So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”
Ms. O’Connor said, “I cannot put in danger the lives of my two children, my musicians, and my technicians, so I have decided to cancel.”
She then wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir, her would-be murderer. She said, “God does not reward those who bring terror to children of the world, So you have succeeded in nothing but your soul’s failure.”
Well, God may not reward them, but Netanyahu will put them in his cabinet.
She became increasingly concerned about the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli military rule and in 2014 she declined to play in Israel. She told an Irish music magazine, “Let’s just say that, on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the f*** the Israeli authorities are doing.”
In 2018 she announced that she had converted to Islam, tweeting, “This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian‘s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant.”
She also praised the beauty of the Qur’an, saying, “Listen to Qur’an recitation… it goes straight to your soul… I find it powerful to hear. What I love is to listen to the beautiful recitations in Arabic and then hear the spoken English. The Arabic recitation has to be listened to.”
I concur, and remember the warm feelings I got from studying the Qur’an in Arabic in Cairo back in 1975.
Khaled Baydoun noted that few obituaries featured pictures of O’Connor, who privately took the name Shuhada Sadaqat, in hijab:
On the other hand, she was an LGBTQ+ ally, and once wore a rainbow hijab. And to be fair, she didn’t always wear a Muslim veil after her conversion. She wrote in her memoir that it wasn’t really possible for her to perform her music in one.
I hope she wrote more about what Islam meant to her in private diaries and correspondence, which will come to light. As with everything in her life, her take on it will have been brave, original, and full of deep ethical insight.
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'Godfather of World Music' Ravi Shankar Dead at 92
Dec 11, 2012
Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar maestro and world renowned musician, has died at the age of 92 in San Diego.
According to the Times of India, Shankar passed away in a local hospital, where he had been admitted last week after complaints of breathing difficulties.
"It is with heavy hearts we write to inform you that Pandit Ravi Shankar, husband, father, and musical soul, passed away today," his wife and daughter, Sukanya and Anoushka Shankar, said in a joint statement.
"As you all know, his health has been fragile for the past several years and on Thursday he underwent a surgery that could have potentially given him a new lease of life.
"Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the surgeons and doctors taking care of him, his body was not able to withstand the strain of the surgery. We were at his side when he passed away," the joint statement said.
"We know that you all feel our loss with us, and we thank you for all of your prayers and good wishes through this difficult time. Although it is a time for sorrow and sadness, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks and to be grateful that we were able to have him as a part of our lives. His spirit and his legacy will live on forever in our hearts and in his music," they said in their joint statement.
Shankar became well known following his close relationship with The Beatles' Geoge Harrison and was beloved in both the east and the west for his ability to transcend cultural barriers with his music.
As Rolling Stone reports:
Dubbed the Godfather of World Music by his most famous student, George Harrison, Shankar learned to play several Indian classical instruments in his teens and began touring abroad in the 1950s, introducing Indian ragas to audiences in Europe and the U.S. Shankar met Harrison in 1966 at a friend's house, where the Beatle approached him about learning to play the sitar after he'd used one on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)." Under Shankar's tutelage, Harrison became proficient in the instrument and played it on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band song "Within You Without You," further igniting interest in ragas and Shankar's work among Beatles fans.
"When George became my student, I got a new audience: the younger generation," Shankar told Rolling Stone in 1997. "And, of course, they came like a flood because the whole thing happened with the hippie movement and this interest in Indian culture. Unfortunately it got all mixed up with drugs and Kamasutra and all that. I was like a rock star . . . I never said one shouldn't take drugs or drink alcohol, but associating drugs with our music and culture, that's something I always fought. I was telling them to come without being high on drugs. I said, 'Give me the chance to make you high through out music,' which it does, really. I think it's good I made that stand, and that's why I'm still here today."
Shankar and Harrison playing sitar in Rishikesh, India in 1968:
And The Guardianreports:
Shankar not only transcended culture, race and geography but also had no difficulty with the generation gap and the phenomenon of class. The children of the flower-power generation turned a deaf ear to their elders but listened most intently to the stranger on the shore.
Showered with citations and awards, the Indian republic made him a Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India) and Britain made him an honorary knight. In the US he received several doctorates and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In later years he divided his time between Encinitas, California, and Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, where the Ravi Shankar Institute of Music and the Performing Arts, fully functional by 2003, was the culmination of his lifelong dream. Housed in an elegant pink granite building, it attracts students from all over the world.
He is survived by his second wife, Sukanya, and their daughter Anoushka who, diligently tutored by her father, is a well-known sitar player. He also leaves a daughter, Norah Jones, the Emmy award-winning singer, from an earlier relationship with the concert producer Sue Jones. Shubhendra, his son from his first marriage, predeceased him.
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