Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills): Music

Friday, December 30, 2011

Music

Matthew Brennan and Hiram Lee (WSWS) look at 2011 in terms of music and note:

The past year was tumultuous on a global scale. There were mass uprisings throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Riots erupted in Britain over the summer amidst increasing social tensions. The Occupy Wall Street movement resonated with millions of people throughout the country and internationally.
Social misery is on the rise: unemployment has risen over the past year, wages are being driven down and social services are under attack. The Obama administration deepened the assault on democratic rights in the US, and expanded the imperialist wars of the Bush era into Libya, Pakistan and Yemen.
Hardly any of this, however, finds reflection as of yet in the pop music scene. The Billboard Top 20 is littered with the over-produced music of groups and individuals who have little of substance to say.

I enjoyed it but wouldn't have read it if I hadn't already written my own piece. (I'd be afraid of borrowing from it.) I finished my piece this morning. I took a rough draft over to C.I. and she sat down with me and edited it. It deals with music, of course, but it opens with me taking on a series of little bitches.

I don't use that term loosely. I'm not here every night saying, "___ is a bitch!" and "Oh, I hate that bitch!"

But I felt it was necessary for my piece. C.I. agreed.

See, this group of women went on NPR to supposedly talk about the year in music and instead talked about divorces and surgery and all the crap you'd expect from a hen session on The View.

Women writing about music have to work very hard to be taken seriously. That's been true forever. So for those bitches to go on NPR and reduce all women to that level was disgusting and offensive and they can rot in hell. In fact, hold on.

Okay, my "Kat's Korner: 2011 in music" just went up. Martha and Shirley need photos still for their piece on books. Ruth's piece is finished but it's too late to call her. That left my piece (which C.I. said she was typing up and she did). The plan was for something to go up today and my piece did. So you can go read it now.

Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Friday, December 30, 2011. Chaos and violence continue, protests take place in Turkey and Iraq over the Turkish military killing 35 Kurds, Nouri's forces attack protesters in Baghdad and seize journalists' equipment, Ayad Allawi reminds everyone of the Erbil Agreement, McClatchy closes its Baghdad Bureau, the political crisis continues, the issue of the families of service members being upset about the media whoring for Barack (the false claim that ALL troops were home for Christmas) finally bubbles up in the media, and more.

AFP's Prashant Rao Tweets:

prashantrao Prashant Rao

Hundreds of people in both Arbil and Sulaimaniyah have protested Turkish air strikes that killed 35. #Iraq #Turkey

11 hours ago

The Kurds are considered to be the largest minority in the world without a homeland. Northern Iraq borders Turkey. As noted in yesterday's snapshot, using drones for 'tracking' and 'surveillance,' the Turkish military then sent air planes to bomb the border northern Iraq and Turkey share to kill members of the PKK. As Mike noted last night, the Turkish government seems to think it would have been okay if the 35 dead and 20 injured were PKK but they weren't PKK, they were Turkish citizens. The PKK is a group of Kurds -- one among many -- who fight (physically fight, use violence) for Kurdish equality and dream of a Kurdish homeland. Many are in the mountains of northern Iraq. They form in 1984 as a response to decades of oppression in Turkey.

And the government of Turkey gives little reason for them to stop. Last week, Kaya Genc (Index On Censorship) reported, "In the latest wave of arrests of those the state claims are linked to the separatist group Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 41 people were detained across Turkey on Monday including many journalists. Initial reports placed the number of media workers arrested at 25, but this number rose in the aftermath of the crackdown. Mustafa Özer, the Agence France-Presse photographer, was among those detained in the operation, which is reported to have taken place in the wee hours of the day. Dicle News Agency's offices in İstanbul, Ankara, Diyarbakır, Van, İzmir and Adana were raided and ten staff members were detained, including the agency's news director, editor in chief and various reporters. Five journalists from Turkey's main Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem were among those detained, as well as reporters from Birgün and Vatan newspapers." Wladimir van Wilgenburg (Rudaw) reports further on the demonization of all things Kurdish, explaining today that a new video game, which is selling briskly (five million in one week alone) is entitled battlefield and allows the player to be a US soldier fighting 'terrorists' -- the 'terrorists' are Kurds and their base, in the game, is the Kurdistan Regional Government (northern Iraq).

Along with protests in Iraq over the killings, there were protests in Turkey as well. The Irish Examiner explains that "thousands" turned out for the funerals today. Al Jazeera adds:

Coffins were brought in a long convoy of cars and ambulances, sounding their horns as mourners flashed defiant V for victory signs.
"It is impossible to kill them mistakenly. The soldiers were 150 metres away and had a bird's eye view," 20-year-old Mehmet from Ortasu village, near the site of the raid, said, referring to troops who observed the attack.
Mehmet, who also makes his living by smuggling goods from the border, said: "I could have been one of the [victims]."
A young woman whose cousin died in the bombing was in tears.
"This was no mistake. They intentionally killed people, who were trying to earn a crust," she said.

The EuroNews notes Turkish government claims that there will be an investigation and, they swear, no cover up. A protester in Uludere shouted, "Damn you, Erdogan . . . One day you too will know our pain!" The 35 killed were in Turkey. For some reason the Turkish government continues to insist upon stating that they were in northern Iraq. IC quotes the PKK's Bahoz Erdal stating, "This massacre was no accident ... It was organised and planned. We urge the people of Kurdistan... to react after this massacre and seek a settling of accounts through uprisings." Alexandra Zavis (Los Angeles Times) notes of the 35 dead "most appeared to be members of an extended family and were under the age of 30."

CNN reports, "Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that he regrets the deaths of 35 civilians in a military airstrike in a Kurdish area on the border with Iraq." BBC News notes Erdogan termed the attack "unfortunate and saddening" and President Abdullah Gul noted "pain" over the murder of the 35. But, as well as noting that 20 people were also injured in the bombing, Bloomberg News quotes Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc stating, among other things, "Turkey is combating terrorism and in that fight incidents like this may occur." That statement really doesn't make the alleged regret seem genuine. Christopher Torchia (AP) adds, "For a second day, stone-throwing demonstrators clashed with police who responded with tear gas and water cannons in several cities in the mostly Kurdish southeat. Protesters lobbed rocks at a national ruling party office in Diyarbakir, the region's biggest city, and Firat said 30 people were arrested there."

A protest took place in Baghdad today as well and the government's actions did not speak well. It did, however, back up an observation Jack Fairweather (Financial Times of London) made today about how "the mechanics of the Iraqi state remain unchanged from the days of Saddam Hussein." Jomana Karadsheh (CNN) captured the protests in a series of Tweets: