I recently got to know the story of the punk band Rebel Riot, from Myanmar. (I used to prefer to call the country "Burma", because the name was changed unilaterally by the military dictatorship that held the country hostage until very recently; but reading around I see everybody has adopted the new name, and on second thought, probably "Burma" was also chosen unilaterally by colonialists, so in the end you choose between the lesser of two evils). The country has opened recently to "democracy" and, from what I've seen, it has already become the usual greedfest in these cases. One out of 4 people live below poverty, rents have gone through the roof putting a lot of people in the streets, the country is in a frenzy of construction that will lead in a few years to an infrastructure collapse... naturally, if you look at it in the newspapers you'll see it is described as "excellent economic growth". Under such conditions, the band Rebel Riot (and another one called something like "Tumbler Spirit" in their language) is a collective of young people who are trying to change things, fostering hope and creating day by day a new way of being punks and human beings. They don't want to be only a band, but a community for change, and they walk the talk with volunteering work, taking regularly time out of their less than comfortable lives to help other people in the streets. Children looking among the trash. By night. Will my species never get tired of scenes like that? Fortunately some of us do, and that's why Rebel Riot tells about these and other realities in their lyrics, which are as frontal and unequivocal as a brick hit on the head, as punk lyrics are meant to be... Necessary remedy to wake up a society that is, I'm willing to bet, half narcotized and half in a state of shock... I'm a European so I cannot tell 100% for sure if I'm right -Asia is known to be torrential, baroque-, but the scenes I've seen of the "thriving" Naypyidaw, the country's capital, made me think instantly of those sci-fi movies of future gone wrong (Babylon A.D., Mad Max...) And don't think that "it's just those weird Asians" and it doesn't affect you; this is the face of unrestricted capitalism left on the loose, and right now it is on the loose everywhere. From many miles away, from a completely different culture, but united in the same love of music, and the same certainty that things must fucking change and it is up to us to do it, I wanted to send a tip of the hat to Kyaw Kyaw and his buddies, and wish them all the best. Hopefully the bands will flourish into a scene, the scene into a social movement, and who knows... It is small groups who start the big changes, it has always been that way. Thank you for being a light, and I hope we can meet along the way some day.
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Nacho Jordi
I have a guitar and I'm gonna use it Archives
September 2018
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