This year, Daniel Pearl Day takes on a heightened level of poignancy following the brutal slaying of American journalist James Foley at the hands of Islamic State militants who are currently staging an insurgency in both Iraq and Syria. Much like Pearl, Foley was killed not for any offense he had committed, but for his nationality, the US the sworn enemy of the upstart IS. The killing highlights the fact that we are still living in an age when people are murdered in cold blood simply for possessing the wrong passport, for having the so-called wrong-colored skin, or for having the, quote-unquote, wrong faith.
We are living in a time when such things divide us — this terrible division having no basis whatsoever within the bounds of logic or human compassion. In such times, we need something to bring us together, not drive us further apart and deeper into the abyss of never-ending war and retribution. It may seem something of an oversimplification, but music could be at least a small part of the long, slow process of unification.
In talking about music as a tool of unification, it’s difficult to avoid getting bogged down in hippy-esque statements about “really doing something, man,” or delving into the celebrity sound bite, “We Are The World”-ness of it. To say in earnest that music is changing the world around it, and not just providing a platform for ego and self-interest, you need something more concrete. One man providing something tangible in that regard is Israeli singer/songwriter Idan Raichel. For over a decade, Raichel has been combining musical languages from all corners of the globe both figuratively and literally, creating seamless juxtapositions of cultures and styles and molding them into a genre all his own that the term World Music does little justice. His band, the Idan Raichel Project, will perform without him at the Daniel Pearl Day concert in Taipei this year, with the founder being called at the last minute to appear at a concert in New York put together by hip hop icon Jay-Z.
Photo courtesy of Elad Weizman
Attendees in Taipei will still have a chance to see his namesake group, however, which takes on various incarnations of anywhere from three to 25 musicians on stage. The result is a form of expression that goes far beyond musical boundaries.
“These musicians, without the band, might never [have] met otherwise,” says Raichel in e-mail interview with the Taipei Times.
“These are musicians from totally different backgrounds, from rock musicians, to village African musicians, from East European classical musicians to DJs of electronic music. They have came from such different places, Morocco, Yemen, the US, Argentina, Ethiopia, the former U.S.S.R., and who knows if they could meet all in the same room without the Idan Raichel project.”
The journey to worldwide recognition for Raichel was a slow one at first. Upon introducing his ambitious melding of music to record labels in his homeland a dozen years ago, he was met with resigned comments on how his style was too “ethnic” to make its mark on the pop scene. But Raichel was determined to give the diverse minorities of Israel a voice.
“In our beloved country,” says Raichel, “there are so many immigrants from so many places around the world, but their voices would not have been heard in the mainstream. The main change that we did with the band is to bring the voices of the streets, the real voices, to the mainstream.”
As the most recent bloody war between Israel and Hamas on Gaza has so tragically illustrated, the Holy Land is a land divided by religious and ethnic conflicts that have raged for millenia and more. These conflicts show no signs of abating in any permanent or meaningful way. In a land of many faiths, each of which has shed the innocent blood of the other, there are hardliners on all sides who take a very literal interpretation of their varied scriptures. Unsurprisingly, Raichel has found that not everyone in his country supports his progressive approach.
“I quote in my songs traditional texts,” he says. “There are many biblical influences. So one Rabbi said that it is not nice to have these holy texts in mainstream music sang by a female singer. [A] Female voice should not be heard singing by the orthodox Jewish people. But another Rabbi said that he is happy that I am bringing these texts to the world.”
Therein lies a microcosm of the often violent struggle within Israel and the world at large for identity and acceptance. We are a world of many voices, many creeds, many nationalities and races. In the Information Age each voice has a platform to be heard. It can be near impossible to rise above the deafening din. But music can bring focus to what is otherwise an overwhelming cacophony. It provides clarity, says Raichel — a means of seeing things in a different light.
“If you put 40 people in the room and you ask them to talk, everyone at the same time, it will be a total mess. But if you ask them to sing all together at the same time, you hear very interesting harmony.”
■ Daniel Pearl Day 2014 takes place tomorrow at Taipei Hakka Cultural Park (客家文化主題公園), 2, Tingzhou Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市汀州路3段2號). Bands will perform on two stages beginning at 2pm. The Idan Raichel Project headlining the World Stage at 8 pm, and 88 Balaz Seeds (8十八顆芭樂籽) headlining the Rock Stage at 8:30pm. Admission is free.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS