Thursday, May 5, 2011

Stream the new Miles Kane album "Colour of the Trap"

Click here to Stream "Colour of the Trap"

Miles Kane, best known as Alex Turner's best friend, releases his solo debut "Colour of the Trap".




Miles was the lead singer/guitarist of The Rascals, who toured with Arctic Monkeys as an opener. While touring, Miles and Alex developed the songs which became their (great) side project The Last Shadow Puppets:






The above video. The Age of the Understatement, was shot in Russia by Romain Gravas, son of filmmaker Costa-Gravas (known for political movies such as 1982's Missing, about Charles Horman, a "disappeared" American supporter of leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende, overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1973).

Romain Gravas also directed M.I.A.'s controversial 2010 video for the song "Born Free", a meditation on the brutality of war, as seen in Bosnia and Sri Lanka:




Never Forget Srebrenica!

The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide, refers to the July 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War...

The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the "Prosecutor v. Krstić" case, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The Hague, ruled that the massacre of the enclave's male inhabitants constituted a crime of genocide.

Theodor Meron, the presiding judge, stated:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity...


The full Wikipedia article on Srebrenica is here


If people have forgotten Bosnia, I'm afraid Westerners know even less about the Sri Lankan civil war, a situation which M.I.A. has tried to correct. M.I.A.'s father was a Tamil activist and she grew up with the extreme violence of the civil war in her homeland, leading to the decision for her and her mother to flee to England, where she landed up in the projects before getting involved in art, video, and music, via her friends in the band Elastica.

The Sri Lankan civil war was a battle between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority (mainly in the north of Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, a large island nation off the SE coast of India, near the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which consists mainly of Tamil ethnics who support Tamil rights in Sri Lanka). The war claimed 100,000 victims or more, especially in the 1980s and 90s, most notably former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, killed by a Tamil Tiger militant. The war was marked by intense brutality, the targeting of civilians, and the use of suicide bombers. It was largely ignored by the Western press throughout the 80s and 90s, the height of the civil war.

This article started out talking about pop music and went somewhere else....


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