Activism in Music

Saul Williams

Saul Williams is musician, poet, writer and actor. In 1998 he played the lead role in Slam, which introduced the world to the slam poetry movement. Williams was exposed to activism from a very young age and mixes genres to find the best way to express himself. ‘Our role as artists is to break the framework of power.’

‘Music is a healing force. It can do a lot to live through emotions through music. Music can arm, and disarm. However, I don’t think of myself as an activist. To me social consciousness is implicit in art, it’s part of my relationship to art and it is what I believe makes art worthwhile and powerful. I never thought of Bob Marley, Nina Simone or Fela Kuti as ‘activists’, even though their work is there to fuel social consciousness. They’re just artists who use the power of art to realize the weight and the pressure than can be imposed through art. It’s just a matter of art to me.

I do make a distinction between artists and people who are more aligned with the idea of being an entertainer. It escapes me when people say “I don’t want to think about anything, I just want to dance”. It feels like a waste, or like a strategic move by an entity that doesn’t want us to think about anything. Entertainment tends towards escapism. It has been and is continually used as propaganda. To spread misinformation. Look at Hollywood Cinema. It shows a US centric, imperialistic worldview. It paints terrorists as Arab, for example. These are casting and writing choices and they perpetuate ideas and ideologies. Being self-aware as an artist means that you’re aware that your work can be used in a particular way, and I choose to embed my work with a certain spirit, so that it cannot be misused.

You know, I think about Nina Simone, who says an artists’ responsibility is to speak to the times. Or about Fela Kuti, saying music is the weapon of the future. When an industry perpetuates this idea of escape or a way of letting off steam, it dilutes the power of art.

It doesn’t feel like a responsibility to me. My main responsibility as an artist is to continually challenge myself to make art that reflects my growth, my understanding, my awareness. And that pushes the envelope of what I think is interesting in a sound, a drum beat, a sentence, you know. My art is more than what I’m saying, it’s also what those words are surrounded by. I believe that instrumental albums can be highly political as well. 

A lot of times it starts with music for me. But other times it’s an idea or an epiphany, and after that the phraseology, the way it falls of the tongue, the way it can lead to other ideas and “paint” something. It depends, also since I’m working in a lot of different formats. Poetry on the one hand, music and literature on the other. I’m always trying to find interesting ways to say what I want to say. Whether it’s overtly and abruptly, or coded or insinuated. All these things are matters of nuance. I enjoy playing in the zone of what is the most interesting way to say it. It’s an intricate dance.

I choose to not make art that feeds the machine. It has consequences, but they are not all negative. It attracts people that I like to interact with. It makes me feel aligned with the people on my team. People who are offended don’t want to work with me, and that’s fine. Who wants to be invited to a party with genocidaires? Those are the welcome consequences. It allows us to see who they are. But the consequences of dealing with the industry are daily. The path that I’ve carved is my own, I don’t feel beholden by genre, but the industry is worried about things like classification. I don’t feel stymied by my choices, but things would be simpler if I had made simpler choices. But you know, as usual, the problem is not with the people, but with the gatekeepers who are trying to maintain a relationship to power. Our role as artists is to break that framework.’

Dirar Kalash

Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist from Palestine. He is a multi-instrumentalist, an improviser and curator of the Sonic Liberation Front, a collective of sound artists who recorded the sounds of protests in the streets of Palestine.

‘As a Palestinian, I know no distinction between my everyday life and what I’m doing musically. There’s no need to call my work “protest music”, my whole being is a protest. The Palestinian case is more than my motivation. It’s my identity, and my drive. It’s the essence of what I’m doing. I started doing music professionally round the year 2000. A lot has changed in the meantime, but not my drives and motivations. My work is always about Palestine and nothing can change that.

‘Some songs have a really long history. “We Can’t Breathe” for example. I first thought about that phrase when I started playing the saxophone, because all of these connections between breathing and playing the saxophone. I was reading Franz Fanon at the same time. He wrote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe”. It stuck with me. And then, years later, the murder of Eric Gardner triggered the piece. Those were his last words. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And they were also the last words of George Floyd. And apparently, the last words of hundreds of Black men being murdered. It's also about a people that can’t breathe. 

‘I don’t regard the audience as just an audience. We share the space and time, we’re together in the room and in this world, and it’s all about how the sound and music are shared between us. It’s in the effect of being there and saying things beyond words. It’s about sharing a moment of preciousness, beyond the senses. Does that make sense? Music isn’t the source of all this, music helps to amplify the message, to give it sound and give it a dimension. The musician is the source, the human being. I think musicians should take more responsibility about the things beyond music. We should be aware of our roles, our complicity and our duties.’

‘I’m not playing since yesterday and I’ve been saying the same things all along. So organizers and promotors know me. If they don’t like me, they don’t invite me, you know? And those who invite me usually know me. It makes borders and marks borders: I know where I shouldn't go. I often get invited alongside Israeli musicians, but I refuse to do that. I go wherever I feel actually welcome. But I never feel restricted to say what I want, and if I do, I know I’m not in my space. 

‘People keep telling me they hope the genocide will end. Hope is lazy, it’s passive. We need the opposite: there’s a lot of willing and work involved in resistance, and it’s extremely active. I want everybody to do more to stop the genocide, myself as well, and it’s up to people how they react to that. I try to say that in other ways than simply saying it with words. I try to say it by music. I don't expect everybody to understand what I'm trying to say or do musically, but at least it's there. The main thing is the composition. It’s up to the audience how to interpret that and where to take it.’

Amirtha Kidambi

Amirtha Kidambi is a composer, vocalist and founder of the ensemble Elder Ones. She challenges systems of oppression, like capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy, but also traditional song structures. Improvising and experimenting result in free jazz and post rock songs, mostly over ten minutes long.

‘Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, once said that the role of the revolutionary is to raise consciousness. I didn’t wake up anti-imperialist. It was through various flash point moments in my life that I got there, and music was always at the core of these moments. I was 15 when 9/11 happened, and it was a big moment of awakening, of conscious raising. Soon after that I got a starters driving permit, which gave me autonomy to go to concerts and protests in the Bay Area where I lived. I was very interested in punk, hiphop, and later also jazz. They are so connected to political histories. It became impossible to disconnect music and activism. 

When I moved to New York, I immediately felt a sense of community. I started justice-oriented organizing at The Silent Barn, a DIY space. In 2015 I was asked to perform at a fundraiser for the family of Mike Brown, an unarmed Black man, a teenager actually, or let’s say: a child, that had been killed by the police in Ferguson. I put together a group of musicians, and that was the first version of Elder Ones. 

I prefer the word “organizer” over artist, because it’s more descriptive of the work that musicians can do.

I think, with the situation we’re in right now in the US, concerts are going to become a very important place of resource sharing and organizing. Another New York musician has been doing ICE watch training in between sets, about what to do when you see them, handing out pamphlets and sharing resources.

I talk a lot before songs. Some people might feel it’s preachy, but I don’t really care. This is the point of performing for me. I’m not going to convince a German Zionist that night to change their position, but it's important, even if it’s just planting a seed. I research each place as much as I can before the show. I noticed for example that European leaders suddenly drew a line about Greenland. Well, they didn’t draw a line when it was Venezuela. Connections have to be made. Musicians have the unique opportunity to travel, like a troubadour, and get an internationalist perspective on things. 

Usually, you don’t know when a festival or promotor won’t book you because of your politics. Most of the time they won’t tell you. But what’s happening around Palestine the last few years was this: a promotor would invite us, and later see that I was wearing a keffiyeh or talking about Palestine, and I got an email saying: sorry, we double booked this date. I answered: “That’s ridiculous.” And they said: “Actually we don’t like your music anymore.” It’s so obvious to me. There was also a festival that made an extremely weird statement afterwards, saying “we distance ourselves from artists who made a one sided call for a free Palestine.” A festival formed in 1968!

I’m slightly less worried about getting shot in Europe. It may sound jarring to say that, but you have to understand how much of a thing that is on our minds in the US. The situation in the US is probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But our situation is not unique. In Europe, you’re going to be dealing with the same. There are so many fascist parties and these ideologies don’t get contained by borders. In fact I think that our role as artists becomes more important. If I only do protest music sometimes or only when I feel safe, it becomes purely aesthetic, symbolic. And if anything, it’s a time to get louder, not quieter.’

Ibrahim Owais & Yara Asmar

Ibrahim Owais is a sound artist, product designer and curator from Palestine. He is one of the co-founders of Radio alHara and he works at the Wonder Cabinet, an art and culture center in Bethlehem. He makes soundscapes and audio narratives that transport people to a different place. ‘We are fighting to exist in an occupied land. Because we live here, we create and produce in order to remain – to protect the land.’’

‘I think every Palestinian, whether they work in the art field or a control room or any other field, is an activist by default. It is always at the back of my mind, and it manifests in my work in different ways. Whether it's telling a story about Palestine or creating a performance or simply designing a program at the Wonder Cabinet, it is a form of activism, because we live here, we create and produce in order to remain – to protect the land and support the community around us in staying on it. We are fighting to exist in an occupied land.

The Cremisan Valley performance at Le Guess Who? 2025 was an attempt to recreate the Cremisan Valley through sound, in Utrecht. The valley is basically the last green area in Bethlehem that is still there for the Palestinians, that we still have access to. But soon it may be part of Jerusalem, which means that it will be Israel, which means that there will be a wall and a gate to enter that area. We did a sound gathering there with some artists. Yara Asmar on saxophone was a big part of it, but she wasn’t there. She’s from Beirut, and people from Lebanon are not allowed to be here and the other way around. So we worked with her and other artists remotely. 

We worked on an installation called the Wind Chime, a chime in the middle of the valley, inside a monastery. It is a big swing. You can sit inside, and you’re surrounded by pipes of different lengths tuned differently by size. It represents the feeling a Palestinian kid might have because of the restrictions in Palestine, the restrictions of movement and basically the occupation of Palestine. I work in layers to recreate the valley in sound. The wind chime is there, the birds are there, the music recordings… 

My earlier project, Recordat, started by creating performances and radio pieces to transport people from the place they are to a different space and let them visualize the sound. It becomes like a movie in audio. This is also what we did at the Sonic Liberation Front. The radio community took over the radio for three months continuously when the Sheikh Jarrah clashes in Jerusalem started. Palestinian sound artist Dirar Kalash created a radio program on Radio alHara where he went to demonstrations, recording all these sounds and he created an hour of a sound protest called The Sonic Front every day.

At a certain point after 2024, I came to think that we should now choose other places around Palestine to turn into sound. Historical places, places that can tell about certain rituals or myths about the land and the Palestinian culture. Not only to preserve it, but also to regenerate it in a different way, through research and a residency for artists. All the recorded sounds together tell a story about Palestine.’

Linn da Quebrada

Linn da Quebrada (‘Linn from the Hood’) is the stage name of Lina Pereira dos Santos. She is a singer, tv-personality and actress from Brazil. As a trans artist, activism is never far away in her work.

‘Everything we know today only exists because someone first imagined or dreamed it. Music gives us the possibility to create new imaginaries, to friction and fictionalize reality, and to invent new ways of being in the world. Over the years, this has become very clear to me through my own experience. The arts scene has changed a lot in the last decade. Despite many setbacks, and although a large part of our LGBTQIAPN+ community still lives under conditions of marginalization, our presence and our cultural, social, and political impact are undeniable today.

What I experience through music reminds me every day that I am not alone. It has allowed me to build a community that supports me, believes in my work, and collaborates so that we can live in a world with more dignity and respect. But it is important to remember that this is still a reality in the making.

An activist to me is someone who acts in a practical, engaged, and direct way to promote social change. I feel that my work in the arts moves in that direction, but it is not limited to it.

What I seek is an artistic practice that allows us to create from our own existence, not as passive subjects of reality, but as its authors. If art is a weapon, then I must first turn it toward myself. At the beginning of my career, with my first album Pajubá, this was expressed in a more direct and sometimes even literal way. Songs like Bixa Preta, Mulher, Enviadescer and Bomba Pra Caralho are no allegories, they come from lived experience. I am not interested in dramatizing or spectacularizing our pain, but in becoming the protagonist of my own story.

As the owner of my own desire, I propose an affective, sexual, and social reorganization of bodies that have historically been treated as abject. I seek to shift our perception of the feminine, proposing an alliance that strengthens and empowers us, both individually and collectively, in a poetic way rather than a didactic one. Part of this trajectory can be seen in the film Bixa Travesty, which won the Teddy Award at the Berlinale in 2018. With my second album, I proposed a different poetic and experimental direction, one that celebrates and invites us to think and to dance. 

I live the consequences of being who I am, both through my art and beyond it. It is not about fixing myself in a rigid identity as a trans, Black, Latin Brazilian artist, but about insisting on my existence. There is a great deal of prejudice, and at times violent comments directed at me. But despite these contradictions, I cannot ignore all the gifts my work has given me. Through it, I have traveled to many countries, connected with many people, and today I feel deeply loved, held, and sustained by the community around me.’