Rwanda: Rises Up! – Album is OUT NOW!!!!

Rwanda: Rises Up the album was released yesterday on itunes and the artist support we have been getting so far has been fantastic. It gave me pause to reminisce a bit about the trip to Rwanda in order to start the recording process and the journey that took place in order to complete it. As I was doing so I stumbled across a Walt Whitman poem that was very apropos and I would like to share the first stanza.

A Song

COME, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.

Some days I lament that perhaps music has a limiting factor on the help that it can do in developing nations but then I remember what an amazing galvanizing force it was/is. Dozens of musicians from Canada to Kigali all bonded over this mystical language that usurped any bonds of status or upbringing.

Life long comrades indeed..

iTunes album: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/song-for-africa-rwanda-rises/id377195935

Ian D’sa & Rwanda: Rises Up!

Everyone knows Ian D’sa as the oft big haired guitarist for the now Canadian vets Billy Talent – but what fans don’t know is what Ian and the rest of his BT boys have done to help great causes.  While Aaron Solowoniuk raises funds & awareness for the MS Society, Ian has been a staunch supported of SFA from the get go.  Participating in the first SFA doc back in 2007, Ian has continued to show his support of Song for Africa’s second project: Rwanda: Rises Up!  Although he didn’t join Tim Edwards, Sarah Slean, Damhnait Doyle, & Steve Bays on this most recent trip to Rwanda, Ian has provided one of the stand out tracks on the sister album (released to iTunes June 22nd on Sony Music!!) entitled “Land of a Thousand Hills.  The song is fantastic and Ian once again shows why he belongs to one of the great Canadian bands around these days.  Check out the lyrics below and please support SFA and our programs by purchasing the iTunes album!

Land of a Thousand Hills

by Ian D’Sa

For love and for country, it’s never the same

To men of high power, the two don’t equate

When leaders of nations, and brokers of hate

Continue to play the most deadly of games

They shuffle their demons, and deal out their sins

Hand out their weapons, like candy to kids

Pull on their people, like puppets on strings

To play out their war, in the court of the king

And the fires keep burning in the middle of the night

The rivers keep flowing like the tears from your eyes

You can still hear the voices of all those who died

In the land of a thousand hills

We drank through the summer, and soaked in the sun

While over the ocean, the killing begun

They followed their leaders, and fired their guns

We had no idea, of what was to come

And the fires keep burning in the middle of the night

The rivers keep flowing like the tears from your eyes

You can still hear the voices of all those who died

They echo, they echo, like shots from a gun

They echo, they echo, like the rhythm of your drum

For one hundred days, you could never see the sun

In the land of a thousand hills

(Guitar solo)

And years will have passed, ‘til the world would find out

The truth of unthinkable violence, so loud

It shattered the heavens, and silenced the crowd

The highest almighty, cannot save us now

Oh my brother, oh my brother, tell me what have you done?!

We’ll hide in the church, ‘til the bulldozers come

There are men with machetes, and children with guns

We’ll never forgive you, for what you have done

And the fires keep burning in the middle of the night

The rivers keep flowing like the tears from your eyes

You can still hear the voices of all those who died

They echo, they echo, like shots from a gun

They echo, they echo, like the rhythm of your drum

The rest of the world will expose all their lies

And all those you silenced will once again rise

For one hundred days, you could never see the sky

In the land of a thousand hills

For one hundred days, you could never see the sky

In the land of a thousand hills

In just a few days…

Well, we’re almost there.
I am really looking forward to presenting our first screening of the new doc, Rwanda: Rises Up! in Toronto this week (with the rest of the country able to watch it this Saturday night on City TV).

The doc screening and album Launch Party happen this Thursday (June 17th) at the Tattoo Rock Parlour – with amazing performances by Steve Bays (Hot Hot Heat), Sarah Slean, Tim Edwards (Crash Parallel), John Angus (The Trews) and Damhnait Doyle.

People are starting to spread the news as well…
Sarah Slean and Damhnait Doyle sounded wonderful on Canada AM this morning performing one of their songs from the album. And you can also look/hear some of us talking up the documentary and album on Etalk and Breakfast Television, and various radio programs around town this week. We’ll post more information when we get it.

Hope you’ll be able to come out and join us this Thursday!

SFA @ Samaritan Magazine

Check out Samaritan Mag’s coverage of the upcoming SFA documentary and album, both titled Rwanda: Rises Up! All the album and doc details are in full – click through to see the full tracklisting for the album – dropping on Sony Music June 22nd!

http://samaritanmag.com/goods/rwanda-rises-up-documentary-and-album-coming-this-month

Music as Divining Rod

The best music, in my opinion, serves as a divining rod to truth and equality. Once a song becomes a metaphor in one’s life, all notions of social class or strata from which it was derived disappear. This was in essence part of the concept for this album. Upon my travels throughout Africa and particularly in Rwanda, I discovered countless musicians and artists who were world class in talent, but lacked the concrete opportunities that we largely take for granted. Sometimes the only qualifying factor between rock star and humble subsistence farmer is accident of birth. The other half to the concept behind this project was to give fair representation of a country that is largely known only for the 21^st century’s most efficient genocide. Rwanda, and to a further extent Africa, is home to more than just the traditional musicians we’ve grown accustomed to through educational tv programming. It is also ripe with a vast array of modern singers and rappers, for example, that one would only expect in Western society.

I hope you enjoy these collaborations that span the globe as much as I enjoyed putting them together.

Darcy Ataman

The Easy Way Out

I was speaking to a friend last night trying to explain how I regulate or compartmentalize my life between Canada and Africa. The best way I could possibly negotiate my way through it is to say that I think we should enjoy our freedoms here but not abuse them. This quickly led me to the precipice of a diatribe on how very little of our population show up to vote where as in other countries people wait in line for hours and risk their lives for a chance at participating in democracy, how that even though roughly 12% of our GDP goes to health care, that at least the system is there,etc. Then I thought to myself how much longer do we have to explain these issues by comparing the haves to the have nots? Is this age of dualism in advocacy and activism relevant or is it becoming antiquated? It’s starting to feel like the easy way out, the lowest common denominator way of educating regarding African development. Granted I am guilty of this too but there has got to be a more respectful way to honor the African people we are partnering with.

Darcy

Feb.28th, 2010

Finding the right words

I have recently returned from my 4th trip to Africa, one month and 3 countries (Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda). Truthfully, I’m desperately trying to find the right words to articulate my experience, a particular one at that. Every word I am typing is coming out extremely slow and laborious. As it stands I’m not allowed yet to recount this certain experience I had in Rwanda and this is the inherent problem, but why?  This is because freedom is only as strong as the weakest link and since my story involves people with no real freedom or more importantly no perceived value (ie., therefore power), my hands are tied at the moment. What good is our own mind numbing freedom when it can’t be used beyond our own self-indulgence? What good is our position as life’s lottery winner if it can’t be used to pull others up the socio-economic ladder? In the coming weeks I will be exploring this field and it’s stark reality of coercion where military funding outstrips our development budgets 20-1. Stay tuned.

Damhnait Doyle Checks In

I am sitting in my hotel room in Ottawa overlooking the Rideau Canal, trying to breathe, reason and well, breathe again for a million reasons. In a month I head to Rwanda with group of artists and a record producer to make an album with local Rwandan Musicians for ” Song For Africa” as well as set up and teach them how to use a recording studio and film a documentary about it. Even more pressing on my mind is that tomorrow I head up to Parliament Hill to interview Canadian Senator General Romeo Dallaire about his insights into Rwanda, it’s people and it’s children and I am more than a little intimidated. In 1994 Dallaire was offered the UN command post for it’s Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, he accepted and ending up flying into a whirling dervish of simmering racial tensions that was set up by Colonialists and funded by the French. Despite Dallaire’s pleas for more troops and requests for permission to raid the massive store of weapons that pointed to a very well planned mass slaughter, the powerful countries of the world decided that Dallaire’s mission should remain a peacekeeping one and ordered him to forget about the cache of weapons for fear of upsetting the balance. This inaction by the UN directly led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 that killed at least 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. It is easy in the western world to turn a blind eye when you hear words like Hutu and Tutsi, almost as if it is something from a book, but if you substitute the words Catholic and Protestant and imagine losing 800 000 souls on the island of Newfoundand in 100 days, anyone in their right mind wouldn’t believe for a minute that the world wouldn’t intervene to save us. But alone with a small band of soldiers Dallaire stood and tried with all his might to do everything he could to change the tides of civil war. From my understanding the years after he returned from Rwanda were mired in deep guilt and regret about every step he took and didn’t take and how the mission failed despite his greatest efforts, weighed down by what if’s and I should have. My question is how do you tell a man that will never believe himself a hero not only for the thousands of lives he did save and for the lives of their children’s children, that he is in fact a hero? I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Perception can be reality

Perception can be reality. I admit this entry is being spurred on by the frustration of the week but it seems that lately truth gets trumped by prejudice or by one’s own preconceived notions of how things are. I’ve realized It is our job then (SFA’s) to better dramatize what happens with our aid money to Africa.

For today I would like to highlight a couple of myths:

” for all the aid money we’ve given Africa, we haven’t seen any results.”

This is simply not true. There has been tremendous progress within the continent. This year alone the US will take 14% of its oil imports from Nigeria and Angola. The continent itself before the economic downturn was growing at a rate of 6% per year which is remarkable when compared to Europe at 2.2% and considering the disadvantage of erroneous trade barriers. The problem is that comparatively the rest of the world is starting from a much higher base. Second, it admittedly was a learning curve on how to effectively disburse aid in its various forms. For many years we as a society negated the local needs and opted for a “father knows best” attitude when disbursing aid flows which was not always effective, efficient or optimal, but that has vastly improved over the years. Lastly, for this entry I would argue that our aid budgets are in reality dismal when we no longer conflate them with our defense budgets. For example, as it stands our true aid budgets for international development stands at roughly .35 of 1% of GDP and the US is close to .1%. With G8 economies reaching trillions of dollars, we are essentially throwing our pocket lint to the poorest people on the planet and wondering why this hasn’t been enough yet to spurn the return on investment needed.

” aid money just gets funneled into corrupt leaders.”

While there is some truth in this, what gets left out in the traditional media is that we are also complicit. During the Cold War era we famously prompted up our favourite tyrants and turned them into corrupt dictators in order for them to hold our interests so to speak. One of the best examples of this is Mobutu from the DRC (formally Zaire), which I’ll go on about at length at another entry. Secondly, corruption is bred from desperation which is obviously rampant in Africa. Lastly though is the lack of positive media stories when democratic progress is made. For example, the post-election violence in Kenya made headlines around the world but shortly thereafter Ghana held very successful democratic elections with an internationally recognized run-off but made very little splash in the mainstream media.

We’ll get it right one day.

- Darcy, CEO

George Pettit Interview with SFA @ EdgeFest

Alexisonfire recently just recently played an enthusiastic and rousing set on a rainy and gloomy Saturday at Edgefest. At the all day TO festival, lead screamer for AOF George Pettit sat down for a brief chat before taking the stage prior to their evening set at Downsview Park. With Metric cranking out the crowd pleasing anthems in the background, I got a chance to catch up with George, where the SFA supporting artist gave up some time to chat about his internet tv personae, the new AOF record, and how sometimes he just feels like a crotchety old man…..

Art and music have such an incredible ability to influence attitudes and behaviours, how do you feel about their ability to create real, as oppose to perceived change? If anything, what music can do, I think that it’s done before, and it did for me, is that it causes people to think differently than they would of if they had not heard it. Bands like the Dead Kennedys and Crass, hearing those bands when I was 16, it was really important in shaping the way I thought about things like politics. In the end it’s just music….it’s just music. The people who are going to make a difference are the people who are getting involved in politics, or activism. And these are probably better ways to change things. Art and music can only go so far….You will never change the world as an artist, but you can change it as an activist. It’s very easy to sit around and point out what’s wrong in the world, very few people have any sort of idea of how to change it or what to do….alot of the things you point out that you want to write about motivate you. Well at least AOF gets involved in ways in which you see fit…. Yah I know, I mean we vote. It’s almost overwhelming, easy to get discouraged. It’s tough to find something to devote 100% of your time to. The big picture is, the world is in peril and can look like a really dooming place, but there is a lot of hope as well. It is equally as beautiful as it is fucking terrifying. Your music kind of reflects this…..Yeah we sing about this on our new album a lot. We live in a very polar world. Sometimes bad things serve as perspective, so you can actually appreciate the good times. It can give you perspective. This contrast also appears in the title of your songs and your new album (Old Crows/Young Cardinals). How are you feeling these days, more like the former or the latter? I think they are both fitting in different ways. In a lot of ways we are young pups still, we always feel like we are perpetually sixteen years old. The older we get, we have more adult responsibilities, but in a lot of ways we are still kids and we enjoy stupid jokes and stuff like that. But then at the same time, you get out on the road, and you kinda feel like the old crow; you are well traveled, and have seen more than most, that can have a different effect on you. There are definite times when we feel like crotchety old men, but in the end we can come back around and realize we are all just kids. So you guys are touring Europe coming up (headlining Leeds and Reading), what is like playing there, compared to playing your home crowd at Edgefest? We did the main stage last year (Leeds and Reading) and it went over amazing, it was great. It’s growing there, it’s maybe not the same as it is here (fans), but it is definitely growing, it’s our second biggest place to play. They like music in general there….sometimes they care too much, the media is unstoppable. Aside from AOF, you are involved in numerous other projects….Yeah I played bass with Fucked Up at 2 shows (show with Vivian Girls and Women @ The Phoenix July 16th link). They are one of my favourite bands for sure. I played with them on some of their 7 inches, and I actually sang on the last track of that record, and we’ve become good friends. And you also have this internet tv program Strange Notes, where you take the time to hang with these artists and you really seem like a fan.…..I am a fan, it’s hard not to be! We’re songwriters, we’ve looked at all of those bands, they are on the same level. I wanted to see those bands talking on tv talking about what they do musically, and not get relegated to a 5 minute segment on a new music program. That’s one thing I thought was lacking; that there were very few television media points where a band like The Constantines, or Ladyhawk, or Jon-Rae Fletcher, could go and you could just talk to them for a half hour and let them talk about where they are from and what they do. You see a lot of bands go on tv, and they are on for like 5 seconds, and they do a potato sack race and then they are done. I don’t feel like I am any more emotionally invested in the band, and I am really invested in all those bands, I love them, I think they are fantastic. We just shot a new part Fucked Up episode. We are going to do an hour long episode on them, we also shot Julie Doiron interview. That one turned out really well too.

Much thanks goes out to George for this, check out more pics from Edgefest here. See y’all at Warped Tour this Friday!

- Peter