Slash and Burn The Music of Stephan Smith
Saulnier, Natasha
Slash and Burn The Music of Stephan Smith By Natasha Saulnier Photo by J. Richard Green Stephan Smith is one of the most promising protest singers in America. The thirty-six-year-old Smith has...
...It advocates global justice and ethical globalization as the only way to stop the current world violence and inequality that breed social division...
...Bitter Happiness," featuring former Gil Evans trumpeter Leif Arntzen, is a jazzy elegy to our ravaged environment: Something odd blows in the breeze, Poison waves the eye can't see, Permeating every tree, Apple blossoms without bees...
...It was also one of the first major antiBush songs released widely in the U.S...
...But I'm not angry at Americans because I know they don't know...
...Natasha Saulnier is a freelance reporter whose works appear in The Independent (UK), Lib?ration, and L'Humanit?, among others...
...Slash and Burn's twelve songs mix political content and pop music...
...Oh but don't you know the truth...
...In a way, I'm building my audience like Ani DiFranco did through the women's movement, but I'm doing it through the global justice movement...
...Other songs on the album include "World to Come," a hauntingly beautiful appeal to the "next world...
...He explains: "While I am drawing on the ballad legacy of writers like Dylan and Guthrie, I'm inspired by people like Bob Marley and John Lennon who used the sounds of their times to make protest accessible...
...The bombs drop in the Sahara Sand While the Clear Channel Radio plays another Boy Band...
...Yes, I do, but you don't," said the child and he stood...
...Smith's musical satire "You Ain't a Cowboy," which addresses an unnamed but obvious American Tartuffe, was pre-released over the Internet on Audiolunchbox.com in what was billed as the first such large-scale MP3 release to benefit a nonprofit...
...said the man at his desk...
...While the publishing and film industries have bankrolled and profited from dissent in the past year, the music industry, once the scion of protest, remains timid," says Smith...
...Linking economic imperialism with military oppression, Smith gives shout-outs to Radical Cheerleaders and the Landless Workers Movement in a powerful rendering of our current situation: While the trees come down in the Amazon Young kids getting killed fighting tanks with stones By soldiers like drones...
...On the first anniversary of 9/11, Smith released his anti-war song "The Bell," recorded with Pete Seeger, as a free MP3 over the Internet...
...The Matterhorn has lost its freeze, There's a shiny layer on the sea, Tell me, what paradise is this, This bitter happiness...
...Protest music can be pop...
...Smith sings in nine languages, including Yiddish and Arabic, befitting his eclectic roots...
...In the Air" is a dance song with a heavy samba beat and rapid-fire lyrics delivered in a Jamaican MC style...
...With all proceeds going to the political action group TrueMajority.org, the hilarious song was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times...
...Oh but don't you love your country...
...We have to be boldly idealistic to reach out to the young, the religious communities, and the working class and to appeal to people's most noble instincts instead of to their intolerance and fears...
...You ate yer whole life from a silver spoon, The whole country knows you're an aristocrat goon, But you still ain't got the sense to know when it's high noon...
...Smith's uncle, Ghazi Kamil, former director of the nation's electrical services, told Smith, "Innocent people, women and children, have been killed and are dying of cancer because of depleted uranium, and for what...
...The album fuses rap, rock, folk, and country music...
...The Bell" was one of the first anti-war statements to make national press: "Oh I'm sounding the drums of war," said the man at his desk...
...It must be both infectious and profound to have widespread social impact...
...For a few individuals to control our oil...
...Despite the fact that no major industry company ever promoted it, "The Bell" was covered by artists ranging from Dave Matthews to DJ Spooky and printed more than 200,000 times on various compilations worldwide...
...The rap, rock, and folk-tinged single "Taking Aim" is, according to Smith, a "hymn to altermondialisme," the French term inspired by the Porto Alegre slogan "Another world is possible...
...Smith has called it "popolitical...
...Look out here come the clones . . . But in Brazil they got people takin' over private land, And in India they go to stop another dam...
...said the man at his desk...
...The thirty-six-year-old Smith has been hailed as the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan for this generation by The New York Times and The Village Voice...
...Smith lets his Appalachian roots come out in his rewrite of the folk standard "Shenandoah," as well as in his rewrite of the classic murder ballad "Omie Wise" in memory of Lee Kyung Hae, the South Korean farmer leader who committed suicide in Cancun in 2003 at the WTO demonstrations...
...The album's title track, "Slash and Burn," with its rebellious lyrics, decries corruption in the music industry...
...His father's family lives in Mosul and Baghdad, where four of his aunts and uncles work as doctors in the main hospitals and occasionally report on their daily lives and struggles...
...She is currently working on the war memoir of Iraq Veteran Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, entitled "Cowboys from Hell...
...So if I can sing harmoniously, I'm sure the whole world can sing in a beautiful chorus...
...Oh I will not fight your war," said the child and he stood...
...Yes, you lie and call it truth," said the child and he stood...
...They lament the fact that the U.S...
...With a flawless Southern drawl, Smith depicts Bush as an imposter and ridicules him as a PR creation: You ain't nothin' but an oil tycoon...
...I grew up in Virginia, steeped in the American musical tradition, but my mother is Austrian, my father Iraqi with Kurdish origins, and I have a Jewish great grandfather," he says...
...Smith is now gearing up to release his pop song "Break the Bread"- which could be deemed a working class anthem for equality, with its obvious religious resonance-in a joint effort with the National Council of Churches...
...We have to reunite America and the world around the dreams of global justice and equality," says Smith...
...Kablam...
...Smith has done more than 140 shows across the United States in a single year, with many gigs for local peace groups...
...His new album, Slash and Burn, on the independent Artemis Records started by Danny Goldberg, touches not only on Bush and the war in Iraq, but on unethical globalization and its trail of iniquities...
...media do not relate the level of suffering placed on ordinary citizens...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
