“If we’re true to ourselves as artists, we write about conditions that are around us. If things aren’t right, that’s something we have to talk about,” Porter says. One track that stood out on Liquid Spirit, ‘1960 What’ came from a really personal place, Porter explains. “My mother had just passed and I was reconnecting with her story growing up in the South,” he recalls. “I was listening to lots of Nina Simone, lots of soul music, deep blues and thinking about the LA riots, which had happened a few years before, and this recurring story of injustice. Similar things have happened at different points in our history. Whether it’s Martin Luther King, Rodney King or the shooting of any young person, it’s that feeling of injustice that sparks emotion – when people feel their rights aren’t being respected.”
The refrain in the chorus, ‘1960, what? 1960, who?’ refers to the numerous Civil Rights Leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, and other figures whose tragic deaths lit the touch-paper for the many incidents of social unrest during the turbulent ‘60s. “I don’t say ‘1970, what?’ or ‘1980, what?’ but the timelessness of the song is implied, for when it happens in the next ten years,” Porter explains. “I hope it doesn’t, but it probably will. It’s a recurring story if we don’t learn from history.”
First aired in Harlem jazz clubs long before Porter’s record deal and the major mobilisation following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York and the growth of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the song feels all the more poignant with each episode of injustice and reaction that hits the headlines.
Read more here...
Source: https://www.huckmag.com/article/gregory-porter-art-protest-song
Comments
Post a Comment