Testify: SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION Plays NXNE

“You can bomb the world to pieces; You can’t bomb the world to peace.”

Let’s wind the clock back ten years. The world was enjoying a small measure of peace. Iraq was that place we’d been ten years ago, and Afghanistan was just a country on a map most North Americans couldn’t find. The musical scene was dominated by bubblegum pop acts and a strange influx of rock-rap groups…and we were buying all of it on shiny plastic discs.

Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? Of course since then the entire world order has changed – both politically and musically – and the musicians featured in SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION are the voices of this new world order.

The film champions artists you might not be so familiar with – names like Paris, Michael Franti, Anti-Flag, and NOFX. The reason for this possible unfamiliarity is because Wal Mart doesn’t carry their music, and Clear Channel won’t play their songs on the radio. Why not? Quite simply because these artists aren’t content to sing about California girls or how they can’t be tamed. No, these artists grabbed a mic and sung out to anyone who would listen that the world had become greedy, broken, corrupt, violent, and callous. Wonder what big box stores didn’t like about that?

They weren’t even the first to take such a radical stance. Lest we forget that forty years earlier, Bob Dylan advised the powers that be to ‘start swimming’ lest they ‘sink like a stone’. Pete Seeger begged the oppressed to hold faith, ensuring them that ‘we shall overcome’. And within days of its occurrence, Crosby Stills Nash and Young painted the sad portrait of four dead in Ohio. Labels gave these artists the freedom to take a stand. Their stand went out over the airwaves and quickly became part of a growing movement. What changed? In a word: money.

“When one makes twenty million, ten-thousand people lose.”

What SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION reminds us, is that musicians reaching out directly to their audiences is very much a new avenue. Remember that even eight or nine years ago, we were still listening to radio controlled by a small handful of corporations, and buying physical music from one of four corporate labels. Think a company as big as Sony wants to put their stock holders behind a song called “When You Don’t Control Your Government, People Want to Kill You”?

Thus, the most socially aware and counter-culture acts were elbowed aside, and forced to work that much harder to get their battle cry heard. They were branded as traitors, unpatriotic. Think The Dixie Chicks had it bad? Imagine taking the same stance at the same time without the bank account to back it up.

“Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me.”

As we know by now, the world has become a much more tightly knit, and the divide between rock star and fan is now only as wide as the artist wants it to be. You might not hear artists like Michael Franti on an episode of CSI…but he no longer has to depend on any corporation, and their attention to the bottom line to get his music heard. It was a tough decade for artists like Franti; artists who seemed only slightly more than average people on the outside.

But as Tom Morello points out, history is not made by Popes and Presidents…it’s made by average people standing up. When our governments, and our media won’t stand up for us, we should count ourselves lucky that we have talented and passionate artists who will step in and do what’s right. SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION is a totem for those who took a stand, and for those who continue to stand up.

SOUNDS LIKE A REVOLUTION plays North by Northeast on Wednesday June 16th – 9:30pm at NFB (150 John Street).