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SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

When the pandemic hit the world in late 2019, the concept of lockdown ceased the social life of the  people and their communities. In these unprecedented circumstances, a video from Italy took the internet. People in Italian towns such as Siena, Benevento, Turin, and Rome were singing from their windows and balconies, which raised morale. The song “Bella Ciao,” an old partisan Italian song, became an anthem of hope against adversity. This anti-fascist song was popularized during the mid-20th century across the globe as a part of progressive movements. Following this, people in many countries around the world created their renditions of “Bella Ciao” in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, French, Spanish, Armenian, German, Portuguese, Russian, and within India in languages such as Punjabi, Marathi, Bangla, and even in sign language renditions. It was such an apt moment that captured the idea of empathy, solidarity, and the human need for community.   This moment was still resonating with me when I was approached by Goethe Institut, New Delhi, to work on music and protest, and create The Music Library. I knew what I needed to do.     

The Music Library was conceptualized as a weekly playlist of protest songs. I believe protests are not just demands but are aspirations, unfulfilled promises that truly represent the resilience of people. I could not imagine anything more beautiful than protest music to represent the world, as it amplifies human desires for connection and better days ahead. I designed it as a weekly music bulletin that people could dwell in for half an hour, and it would be like a short musical insight to that country or theme. Although the project had to be cut short due to institutional limitations, The Music Library creted 36 weekly playlists focused on liberation movements, anti-colonial struggles, people’s uprisings, and popular expressions of dissent.

The Music Library hosts two types of playlists: issue-based and country- or region-specific. This approach curates and classifies music for a broader audience attuned to these categories. When I prepare a playlist, the first thing I seek is to incorporate marginalized and diverse voices. Diversity can be based on caste, gender, language, region, and more. I typically favor field recordings, amateur productions, and emerging artists. Occasionally, the featured artists have as few as 50 views on their videos. After listening to numerous songs and consulting individuals with greater expertise, I select 5-8 songs and then write a blurb to introduce the playlist. Sometimes, I also seek help for language assistance. In that sense, it’s a very collaborative effort. The Music Library’s mission resonates with Merje Laiapea’s mapping of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion through music. The Music Library similarly engages protest music, but with a wider array of areas and themes.    

After the first few weeks, I decided to transition from Indian protest music to global and I wanted to foster a gradual introduction instead of a snap transition. I realized that inviting guest curators would enable the transition to linger on for a bit before settling in, and the guest curators would have a much better idea of the protest culture in their respective country and/or area of research. For example, Sara Kazmi, a scholar-activist-singer from Pakistan, curated a playlist on protest music of Pakistan; Yueng, who is researching Hong Kong music for his Ph.D, curated a playlist on The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. So their expertise and knowledge of respective countries give us a better sense of what protest music is for people there than I could provide on my own. Like Sara and Yueng, many of the guest curators have either been part of protest movements or have written, observed, or researched closely. Likewise, there are guest playlists by musicologist Lucas Avidan that emphasize the prominence of hip-hop music, or as some call it “Bonga flava” in Tanzanian protest music, and a playlist on MC Todfod, an emerging rapper from Mumbai Hip-Hop collective Swadesi who passed away at the age of 24. Protests themselves are essentially about bringing people together and working together. In this sense, the co-curatorial process resonated with the idea of protest music itself as a collective action.

The idea of protest is essentially an act, attitude, orientation, and assertion against the dominant conservative system. So, in that sense, its definition is as varied as the kinds of conservatism existing in societies. It could be based on class, caste, gender, race, nation, region, language, food, and culture. In short, protest music means speaking up against power. Protest music plays multiple roles for the people practicing it or whom it represents. In a highly unequal power relationship, it is like a crack or a rupture against hegemony. In others, it asserts power. For many, protest music symbolizes an idea, utopia, like one world or Begumpura, i.e., land without sorrow, in 15th-century saint-poet Ravidas from India. With old social issues such as casteism, patriarchy, feudalism still lingering around and consolidating, and capitalism and nationalism getting strongholds across the globe, the world is more fragmented and hostile. In this situation, the protest music from around the world raises some particular issues but also many universal ones, such as equality, recognition, dignity, food, housing, healthcare, education, and above all, the right to live as an equal citizen. The Music Library brings all of this protest music under a single umbrella, as all this music has one thing in common: Resilience! At times, The Music Library is a music room that soothes, and other times a war cry for equality!

Bangladesh’s playlist, for example, curated by Dhaka-based artist, Emdadul Hoque Topu, is based on Liberation War songs. The Liberation War was a unique liberation movement based on linguistic identity. So, language, a mode of expression like music, was at the heart of the movement. Interestingly, when the recent popular uprising occurred, I was in Dhaka and saw the popular resentment against the Liberation War and its icons. It shows that protest music is as evolving and contemporary as any other expressive form, one age’s protest song could later turn into a voice of the oppressor or used to oppress any dissent. For instance, Rajakars, a term that till recently had very negative connotation due to its association with the detractors of anti-liberation, has been employed and repurposed in a chant or slogan ami ke, tumi ke, Rajakar, Rajakar (who am I, who are you, Rajakar, Rajakar) for the current uprising that led to the overthrow of the Sheikh Hasina-led government.

In another instance, the historic Farmer’s Protest of 2020-21 in India–termed the biggest movement in recorded history– has led to a proliferation of music to bolster it. Though the protest started in the north Indian state of Punjab, it spread across India and drew global support. Punjab is a musically unique place; it is one of India’s most popular and prolific independent music industries. Due to early migration history, Punjabi music has spread globally and has been adaptive of derived from various musical cultures such as rap, pop, etc, while maintaining its distinct linguistic identity. This made the Punjabi music popular and relevant beyond its linguistic boundaries. The movement has been chronicled by a newsletter called the Trolley Times, where I worked as a co-editor. Numerous Punjabi singers have contributed immensely by producing music and being part of the movement. After a long time, a strong impulse in the popular cultural sphere evolved in solidarity with the mass movement.

The Music Library was under construction when the world was going through a pandemic, and unprecedented isolation, a hallmark of oppression.  In the pandemic, when people were dying, this quote became popular: Corona is the virus, Capitalism is the pandemic. People could see the havoc of capitalism playing out in full public display from the first world to the third world. Someone who is cornered, pushed against the wall, with no recourse to grievance redressal, cries out to make themselves count, and find solidarity and rise. I designed The Music Library to show how music can break a slumber and bring people to march together, similarly to what “Bella Ciao” did during COVID-19.

It began as a hum that was joined by neighbors, and then it spread, loudly, across the world as an expression of solidarity and resilience. “Bella Ciao” is such a marvellous testimony of what music can do and has been doing! I hope The Music Library serves as a humble repository of this resilience.

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Featured Image: Image of “Bella Ciao” being sung in Santiago, Chile during the ‘estallido social’ (2019) by AbarcaVasti, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Mukesh Kulriya is a Ph.D. scholar in Ethnomusicology at The Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of music and religion in South Asia in the context of gender and caste. His Ph.D. research examines bhakti, or devotion practices within the ambit of popular religion in Rajasthan, India. Since 2010, he has collaborated on India-based projects centered around the craft, culture, folk music, and oral traditions as an organizer, archivist, translator, and researcher. He also works on global protest music and currently working on a podcast on Music and Hate.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Twitchy Ears: A Document of Protest Sound at a Distance–Ben Tausig

The Sounds of Anti-Anti-Essentialism: Listening to Black Consciousness in the Classroom – Carter Mathes 

#MMLPQTP Politics: Soccer Chants, Viral Memes, and Argentina’s 2018 “Hit of the Summer”–Michael S. O’Brien 

A Tradition of Free and Odious Utterance: Free Speech & Sacred Noise in Steve Waters’s Temple–Gabriel Salomon Mindel and Alexander J. Ullman

Singing The Resistance: January 2017’s Anti-Trump Music Videos–Holger Schulze

Chronicles of the Cyber Village: Colonialism and Advertising in the Age of AI

By Nguyen Thi Thanh Tra

I’ve been using Notion for many years at this point. My life goes through it, for good and for worse, and it has changed because of it, like it happens with the extensive adoption of any software. It allowed me to be extremely effective and structured in what I do: I have several jobs in very diverse fields: organization consultancy, facilitation, education, fermentation, software design and development, adversarial research against platforms, and occasionally also life coaching and mentoring. Luckily, I come from a Mediterranean culture, so I have strong anti-hustle safeguards. The productivity enabled by Notion might have turned me into a productivist person, shunned as the lowest lifeform south of the Alps.

Two years ago, I wrote the following article to share my understanding of Notion, why it’s so powerful, and why people are using it for pretty much anything. I tried to reflect on its limitations, which here on INC might sound obvious: we don’t want our life or our organization to be tied to the whims of an American corporation with no way to detach ourselves. This set me on a path to explore what’s moving in the space of new technical languages: no-code platforms, new paradigms of knowledge management and coordination, new paradigms of software altogether.

At the time, the landscape for Notion alternatives was rather scarce, with few, immature options. Notion’s user base kept growing and with it, the need to escape from its walled garden. I patched up the article here and there, updating it to reflect the new status quo.

To reflect the centralizing power of Notion, the article has been published as a Notion page. As you will see, the nested and linked format of the article won’t lend itself to be transfered to a traditional, skeumorphic, old-fashioned, flat page here on INC’s website. We opted to keep in its native format. Ejnoy!

Link to the Article

“How Present is Wall”, reads white panel installed in the grassy park in Berlin, tightly fit with five other layers of the same design. Arranged in a zig-zag, the installation ends with: „How Strong is Border“, „How Liberation is Freedom“. None of them end with question marks.

There is one thing that strikes me the most: the middle panel, asking or stating, „How    is Longing“. It lacks an adjective. The space between interrogative adverb and present tense verb is empty; but do we really need to fill it with one word after all?, I ask myself.

There is a continuous current of longing and yearning that is difficult to keep straight, yet they stick. They inflate the pool of memories and dive in and out between our selves. And there is toughness to reminiscence: longing stays elastic and steady. I like to think that longing holds us in place, gives us a dwelling place. And sometimes, this is mediated by our choices in how we remember what has already long passed, or perhaps, places around us do the remembering for us and with us.

In 2022, I went to Berlin for my master’s thesis fieldwork to explore the memory-making of German Democratic Republic, in particular, remembrance practices among former political prisoners of STASI and places that stake a claim on memory: museums and memorials dedicated to the GDR period. When having conversations with former citizens of the GDR, I realised that when the „remembering happens“, the bodies of the Rememberers are continuously moulded. The past is rediscovered again and again, with the temporal boundaries – bridging words of „here“ and „there“ that help the memory to narrate itself. Yet, how    is longing for places that produce the memory?

Choose your own mundanity

Memory sites are dead material – they are inherently mute, for they hold no memories of their own until people invest them with meaning. In contemporary debates about GDR memory, there is a marked split: on one hand, material remains underscore a state of injustice. On the other hand, some representations tend to showcase naïve sentimentalizing and, at worst, intentional banalising of the GDR past. The German term, Ostalgie embodies the latter, as it is a conflation of two German words: ‘East’ and ‘nostalgia’. Yet, Ostalgie is not necessarily about an obsession with the GDR era, but it rather might be an embattled site of memory-making, where individual experiences and biographies seek legitimacy.

In recent years, there has been a tendency to gloss over the totalitarian past of Germany, reframing the feeling of Ostalgie as a mainstream sentiment. The DDR Museum in Berlin exemplifies this shift. With its approximately 10,000 artifacts – ranging from bottles of kitchen cleansers to speaking windows at the border checkpoints – it presents a collection of mundanity. In a way, it preserves personal memorabilia, but, this type of memorabilia sometimes is emptied of its intimate weight they once carried.

When I was scrolling through the website of the DDR Museum, I saw this little section of how museum introduces itself as a Looking Glass into a „bygone state“. By describing itself as “unique” and “extraordinary”, it seems the museum detaches itself from other, conventional museums. It states, the history, and in particular, everyday life in the GDR is conveyed in “scientifically sound” way, and also sensorially crafted in a way that feels accessible, and even – enjoyable.

Writing such description focused on its extraordinary nature on the website to attract visitors is a conventional marketing language aimed at drawing interest, which is a standard approach. Yet stating it is a “scientifically sound” way to engage with the past is also claiming the memory, but whose, or which memory? What does it mean to be “unique”, or “scientifically sound” anyway?

Choose your own DDR

The interface of the website provides the users with a huge display of two people sitting in a Trabant car, one person pointing to the direction of socialist building from the windshield. The space itself also had a real Trabant car, in which visitors could sit and have “journey back in the GDR”, along with experiencing the “daily life” while entering the rooms of furnished high-rise block tower, taking a seat in front of a small soviet TV in the reconstructed living room typical to the GDR housing, and looking into the reconstructed, “socialist” bedrooms.

Each item there had its own history, which created a drifting experience, but it went to places that are fallen into disuse, and disrepair. These are infrastructures that are failing, but failing in a consistent way, as this failure repurposes itself as somewhat entertaining in the contemporary museum scene. It is clear it is all staged, for raising an awareness, but mostly, for entertaining purpose. The museum almost makes a spectacle out of grey block buildings and the dull weather, that one can see and “immerse themselves into” when on-site.

The reconstruction of the past in such straightforward way was worth of analysis for several reasons: I wanted to see how the museum positions itself in the current memory debate about German socialist past, especially considering its promise for multisensorial experiences: when the visitors can touch, feel, listen, and truly inhabit the space. Soon, I asked myself whether the museum was building a collective mythology, or rather, an entirely new memory, not ex nihilo but out of a fixed understanding of the past remembrance. Interestingly, it lets you choose what to dwell on, what to contemplate, precisely. But doesn’t it also serve as a counter-memory of the past experienced by people who feel their lives were museumified?

One of my respondents once told me he could not bear the boredom of the being anymore, that it was all dull, grey and dreary; that life there had no colours; that buildings had no new windows, that everything was so old and dysfunctional; let alone the greyness of smell – the smoke produced by factories that prevailed the whole East Germany. Yet, in another realm, in the West, people had all the smells and colours, they had all kinds of fruits and that’s where he tasted Kiwi for the first time after the Fall of Berlin Wall.

Another woman I talked to tells me in a concerning tone of voice that there were no deep connections among lovers, „it was not love and sex together, but it was just sex, sex, sex. The boredom of it, no theater and no cinema“. „This endless boredom, it’s something I remember the most“, tells me another respondent, „the scenery was so unbearably boring, even going to the summer houses during holidays, it was so, so boring. No other people around, TV showing nothing interesting. That’s why they drank so much, you know.“

Boredom was a way of living according to people I talked to, and it also served as a state of being – as an antidote to what the West embodied. Yet, I could not see any equivalent of boredom when visiting DDR museum, I saw the past residues displayed there as a different kind of embodiment, these life histories, online and offline are commemorated in a way that the spectacularity is maintained.

Choose your Fighter  

While reading short informative texts about GDR artifacts, its borderzones, and STASI surveillance, a digital screen caught my attention with the phrase: THE NEW SOCIALIST HUMAN, against the background of the Soviet-style wallpaper.

After choosing a field of choice, this type of “interactive game” enabled the visitors to customize a character by choosing a face from four facial expressions. The next step involved selecting clothing for their desired character, again with four options. In case of “pink socialist human”, there were two dresses and two trousers, aimed at „building“ some kind of a GDR persona. Users could also select desired hairstyle (again, out of four options), top, shoes, hat, jewellery, bag, book, accessory, and a flag symbol. Each section provided a brief information. The category of jewellery stated:

„Have you just been released from prison? Piercing and tattoos have no place in the life of good Socialist. Rings are to be worn on your fingers and then no more than a wedding ring.“

Once the character was complete, one could print their versions. The objects, such as Trabant cars, bear the legacy of ideology, yet „taking an artificial ride in the GDR landscape for several minutes“ removes such object from the realm of politics, and such activity with GDR artifact becomes a source of entertainment. But what about actual „humans that represent Socialism“ as illustrated by the museum? Can the complexity of people living in the GDR inserted into a game-like understanding of a person as a whole?

This reminds me of the psychoanalyst, Hans Joachim Maaz making quite a long remark in his work, „Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany“ about the psychological portrait of the collapsed „existing real socialism“ of the GDR. He boldly stresses the „dysfunctional traits“ of East Germans, noting that „the East German personality suffered from the „deficiency syndrome“: deprived of everything from good service to clean air to unconditional love, East Germans invariably blocked instinctive emotional responses and often channeled them into dysfunctional outlets, such as overeating, drinking, smoking, and watching television“. This is quite a risky and stigmatised statement to make, let alone calling „overeating“ (whatever that might contain and however this data was collected statistically), „drinking, smoking and watching television“ a dysfunctional trait.

There is also a universalised term in some disciplines within social sciences, rendering the whole generation to Homo Sovieticus, which also makes me question how these bodies are constructed within the everpresent gaze from Us to Them. And what about digital Socialist bodies we stumble upon from time to time? Reducing a trope of socialist persona to merely four options, as the little screen indicated, might also be museum’s intention to reconstruct the stereotype of Soviet propaganda by offering „fun and rich“ experience of building a new Socialist human within its cultural and political policies. However, considering the complexity of these individuals, this type of reconstruction might have a dual nature: while intending to showcase Socialist stereotypes, this representation becomes disconnected from the actual owners of their political or cultural bodies, or even, personal life-stories they might be embodying. In other words, it becomes a stigma reinforced by stigma.

This digital screen, regardless of what it carries, it serves as a memory carrier. It does create a unified narrative, and it is exclusive of the complex memorabilia of bodies, digital or lived. And it does create new memory site of its own, some kind of an artificial fabric from which we choose our fighters, we build them, we play the game and we are taking a journey in somewhat bygone space full of failures.