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Peter Brathwaite: Why I'm celebrating 'degenerate' music

Musicians calling for equal rights regardless of gender, race and sexuality in 1930s Germany were banned. We need their voices more than ever

A few weeks ago I posted a photograph on Twitter. Yellowed and cracked with age, it showed my mum as a young nurse in London, smiling, proud and starched in her puff- sleeved uniform. The Windrush scandal was raging and it pained me to hear the palpable sorrow in her Bajan lilt when we discussed the treatment of those who had been labelled “illegal”. Feeling powerless, I had taken to social media to try to honour the ways mum and her generation had carried on against the odds, fought for equality and helped to rebuild post-war Britain.

I was reminded of my mum’s old nursing outfit last week, when I saw a picture of myself wearing a similar, old-fashioned blue frock. It’s one of my costumes in Effigies of Wickedness! (Songs Banned by the Nazis). I wear it to sing a Hanns Eisler protest song that feels as fresh and pertinent as it must have done when it was written 88 years ago. Eisler’s Solidarity Song, composed for Bertold Brecht’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?) is one of their “fight songs” – calls to action, pleas for us all to “raise our voices” in the fight for equality, a plea for empathy and respect for everyone, regardless of race or colour.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Jf74rb
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