Watch: ANOHNI Shares a Video for the Politically Charged “Crisis” | Under the Radar | Music Blog for the Indie Music Magazine
Monday, December 9th, 2024  

Watch: ANOHNI Shares a Video for the Politically Charged “Crisis”

HOPELESSNESS Out Now via Secretly Canadian

Sep 09, 2016 ANOHNI

ANOHNI released a new album, HOPELESSNESS, back in May via Secretly Canadian. Now she has shared a video for politically charged song “Crisis.” The song takes on drone warfare and torture, but the simple and affecting video simply features a static shot of the head and shoulders of New York performer Storm Lever lip-syncing the song. Watch below.

A press release included the song’s lyrics:

“Crisis
If I killed your father with a drone bomb
How would you feel?

Crisis
If I killed your mother with a drone bomb
How would you feel?

Father
If I killed your children with a drone bomb
How would you feel?

Crisis
If I tortured your brother in Guantanamo
I’m Sorry

Now you’re cutting heads off
Innocent people on TV

Daughter
If I filled up your mass graves
And attacked your countries under false premise
I’m sorry”

ANOHNI also issued a statement in the press release: “De-escalation cannot occur until we truly account for what the United States has done. I wanted to model what that might look like on a personal level as an American citizen. There is an unspoken sense that the atrocities our country has committed in the Middle East are too grave to really acknowledge or account for. And yet for peace to really take hold, there is no other road forward.”

The press release also included the following text that further explains what ANOHNI is getting at:

“ANOHNI wrestles with her complicity as an American citizen and taxpayer and in relation to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. ‘Crisis’ is her version of America’s un-issued Chilcot report. The lyrics of ‘Crisis’ inventory some of the ways in which the U.S. has exacerbated and helped to provoke the current global ‘Crisis’:

1. Declaring the Iraq war under the false premise that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.
2. Causing the deaths of more than half a million Iraqis.
3. Imprisoning suspects, many of whom were innocent, indefinitely in offshore secret prisons.
4. Torturing and killing suspects under the Bush administration.
5. Depriving suspects of human rights and habeas corpus.
6. Switching tactics under Obama’s administration and using drones to execute suspects and bystanders across the Middle East and beyond.
7. Imprisoning whistleblowers under Obama’s administration for having the moral courage to identify U.S. criminality.
8. Filling corporate pockets with federal monies syphoned for war, weaponry and ‘reconstruction.’”



Comments

Submit your comment

Name Required

Email Required, will not be published

URL

Remember my personal information
Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:

There are no comments for this entry yet.