Saul Williams, MartyrLoserKing, hacking, intersectionnalité, Burundi, musique et BD
Saul Williams sort un nouveau projet dans une ou deux semaines. Il s’agit d’un album de musique + un roman graphique qui est centré autour d’un hacker anarchiste du Burundi dont le pseudo est MartyrLoserKing. Ah et il est avec une femme transgenre aussi.
“Poets are midwives of reality.” ~ John Keats
Not long ago, I began writing and recording MartyrLoserKing- the screen-name of a hacker, living in Burundi, who rises in virtual fame and escapes authorites who assume that someone in a more popular location must simply be throwing their signal.
I was inspired by current events and reailties playing out in real time, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, the actions of players like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the suicide of Aaron Swartz, and the proliferation of new technology: cameras, phones, tracking devices, drones and the growing sense of the unexpected, the flashmob, the protester in the face of an increasingly militarized world, and decidedly rooted the story in a world I was growing more and more familiar with through my personal life, living in Paris, and it’s proximity to Africa.
I chose Burundi for the setting because of the role that Bujumbura played in the imagination of previous generations of the Great Lakes regions, as a destination for music, good times, a way of life, as a place to dream of and look forward to, like others might dream of Paris. Simultaneously, I learned of the role of Burundian drums in the sound of New Wave, of far off England. When I finally wrote the first song for the album, I never imagined that its release would coincide with actual unrest and protests in the area. Nor did I imagine the wave of protests that would arise in America in response to the unwarranted killings of youth, blacks, poor and the disenfranchised.
As it stands, I am on the cusp of releasing an album that feels completely aligned with a fight against religious extremes, dictatorships, poverty/wealth discrepancy, biased gender and marriage views set into law, and the continued oblivious nature of the wealthy and privileged whose comfort comes at the heavily exploited expense of natural resources and unseen/uheard people.
The middle finger is for the corporate, religious, and government pushback against the democratic progression of humanity; for the naysayers that force a new generation to face the same discrimination as their parents and grand-parents, for the continual and heartless push of the 1% and their minions. Needless to say, I’m fed up.
