"My President is Black"

One of the best ways to learn about other cultures is to listen to their music. You can learn a lot about the political or economic situation in a particular country by listening to popular songs from a particular era.

This song, only released a couple of years ago in South Africa, idealizes the Boers' victory over the British over 100 years ago. It celebrates Afrikaner nationalism and has attracted a tremendous amount of controversy for bringing up this violent part of South African history and tying it to current struggles between ethnic groups.



A sampling of the lyrics in English:

Because my wife and my child are in a camp dying,
And the Khakis are walking over a nation that will rise again

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?

In Spain, too, music continues to mimic political dialogue. One of my favorite Spanish-language songs, Pais Petit by Lluís Llach, was written as a celebration of Catalan culture at a time that the Franco dictatorship was trying to suppress these kinds of vibrant regional cultures:

The first verse, translated:

My country [Catalan] is so small
that when the sun goes to sleep,
he's never sure if he has seen it.
Old wise women say,
that's why he comes back.

Maybe this is an example of an historian's tendency to always think of a previous era as a golden age, but I don't think much of our contemporary music in the U.S. can compare to these politically salient songs from elsewhere.

In the 1960s and 1970s, certainly, we could point to direct ties between music and politics. Today, we are left with performances such as this one:

Lyrics:

Tell him I'm doing fine, Obama for mankind
We ready for damn change so ya'll let the man shine
Stuntin' on Martin Luther, feelin' just like a King
Guess this is what he meant when he said that he had a dream.

Even though I'm a fan of rap music in general, I'm left feeling like this doesn't really compare to what we see in other countries, or even from other eras in our own nation. But who knows...maybe in a couple decades we'll see it differently.