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Skype Rock: A Pirate Live Stream For Banned Music

Despite harboring an image founded on rebellion, there’s never been a really serious existential threat to pop music in its primary countries of origin. It might have seemed dangerous when Elvis was thrusting his hips or the Sex Pistols spiked their...

Despite harboring an image founded on rebellion, there's never been a really serious existential threat to pop music in its primary countries of origin. It might have seemed dangerous when Elvis was thrusting his hips or the Sex Pistols spiked their hair, but no one was going to stop them from playing music.

The rebellion young Americans got to participate in by listening to rock music was one of taste – embracing a style that convention held was offensive. Point being, listening to and playing the stuff was always actually pretty safe on most counts.

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Which is why it's sort of ironic that it's only when rock and pop got exported to countries truly lacking freedoms of expression that it became the source for rebellion it seemed built to be. Rock music was flat out banned in Indonesia in the 70s, and musicians risked arrest to play it. Rock has been used as a medium to protest authoritarian regimes — Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, the Czech Republic come to mind.

And rock is still radical. Iran, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, and plenty of other nations still clamp down on all or certain kinds of rock and pop music. A female-fronted rock band called Plastic Wave in Iran, for example, breaks the law by performing in public. The military in Guinea-Bissau reportedly rounds up musicians like the Baloberos Crew who perform any songs with unflattering messages to the nation's government.

But that doesn't mean we can't hear those tunes here. In fact, we can see both bands live – sort of.

A concert series called the Impossible Music Sessions is giving audiences in Park Slope, Brooklyn – and on the Internet – a taste of bands from places where censorship is prevalent. And they do so with what's essentially a Skype'd in concert, beaming the band in over a broadband connection to perform their songs for an American audience. Afterwards, a stateside band that's collaborated with the band from abroad performs versions of their tunes live.

This video sums up the spirit of the arrangement:

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The cross-proliferation of ideas and ethics allowed by the event makes for a fascinating opportunity — there's the chance for the censored band to share its music and message, and a chance for American rock music fans to become at least a little acquainted with what the music is supposed to be about in the first place.

The series' motto, which has probably been used in promo language for an untold number of Western rock bands, holds true for once: "You're not supposed to hear this."

Update: Music Freedom Day took place on March 3, 2011; Reuters covered it: “The event kicked off with concerts in Mumbai and Kabul and ends with a session in New York and special broadcasting programmes in Canada after events in Egypt and Lebanon paying tribute to Egyptian musician Ahmed Basiouni, who died on the fourth day of demonstrations in Cairo earlier this year.” (Read about Ahmed and hear other music of the revolution here.) Brian Merchant is a journalist and a founder of the forward-looking web magazine The Utopianist.

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