Ctrl.Alt.Spotify: Corruption

Welcome back to the newest edition of the Ctl.Alt.Spotify mixtape! A quick recap before we start - if you’re still confused as to what Spotify is, it’s a free music player and streaming service available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain and France. You can download it here [1].

And for those unaccustomed to Spotify and are looking for a ready alternative, we have the Youtube playlist for your surfing pleasure. But now, in keeping with the mixtape projects on racism [2] and World Aids Day [3], we bring you the anti-corruption play...

Click here for the Ctrl.Alt.Spotify: Corruption Playlist [4]

Click here for the YouTube Playlist [5]

Just in case you have been sleepwalking through the last two years let me try and sum up what now seems an undisputed truth - corruption makes the world go round. But how does this seem to happen when few people begin their careers with the intention of becoming corrupt? Being placed in a position of power can bring its own temptations to bend rules in the name of a ‘perceived good’. At other times, once in power, the instinct to barricade the door and do anything it takes to stay inside is all too familiar. And in some contexts corruption is so entrenched that it becomes impossible not to become involved in it if you want to get by at all, let alone to prosper. Are we then to believe that well worn dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

While on a typical day we might associate ‘corruption’ with words like duck houses, cash for honours, brown envelopes and the digital rights lobby, the story of corrupt practice, like the songs that have been written against it, are full of immediate complexity and drama. Like masked magicians, songwriters bring us ever closer to the fabric of illusions that conceal crafty hoaxes in everyday life and uncover them for us, revealing the very deception that has kept them out of sight. As Larry David might appreciate, musicians have been cutting through ‘the babbling brook of bullshit’ on our behalf since time immemorial. 

So forget shouty, bleating exercises in balls of venom and angst coming from misplaced derivatives at all things crooked and scorched in the world. Anti-corruption songs are more cunning than that. Some speak out against it. Others educate on the root causes of it. Sometimes, willingly or not, others have promoted it. So sit back, enjoy and be inspired - whether your taste is for jazz, rock, metal, rap or reggae in French, Algerian, English or Bambara – the fight against corruption goes on…

Track 1: Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood
Just as the onscreen characters of Clint Eastwood were the anti-heroes of idealised cowboy westerns, Gorillaz smashed onto the British scene as ironic virtual ‘musicians’ tasked with deconstructing and exposing the ‘hype shit’ our music industry churns out, packaged and ready made for consumption: ‘You see destruction and demise, corruption in disguise/From this fucking enterprise, now I'm sucking to your lies’. The fight back by music makers against profit takers is an ongoing crisis that is going public. Gorillaz remind us that we don’t always actually see what’s there – only what they want us to see.
 

Track 2:  Amadou & Mariam - Politic Amagni
The duo’s voices slide between Bambara, English and French on ‘Politic amagni’, asserting, "We don't want demagogy. We don't want corruption. We don't want extortion!" There is nothing gentle about their message – however rendered it is through saccharine pop beats and trad Mali music. This is not an ask – this is a demand; for a more honest politics and for political integrity, ‘Politicians, listen to us...’.
 

Track 3: Mos Def – Mathematics
The daily grind of abstract number crunching as social commentary has its limits. Taking an ordinary thing such as the grouping of individuals and their complex lives into neat categories and percentage points, Mos Def deconstructs how we view each other into a raw, lyrical and blisteringly sharp mathematical equation that dehumanises poverty and corrupts us all. The parochial function of social science by governments and ineffective perception of social conditions have never been so readily exposed by the logic and algebra that hold it all together. Mos Def raps to educate and inspire his audience into action: 'Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings/ but you push too hard, even numbers got limits/ Why did one straw break the camel's back? Here's the secret/ the million other straws underneath it - it's all mathematics'.
 

Track 4: Rachid Taha – Barra Barra
French-Algerian musician Rachid Taha has been rocking the North African Casbah in Arabic for quite some time. Here we find him at his most political, calling all Algerians to barra barra or get out or everybody out! from the treachery, oppression and corruption of the government. ‘Only the walls are left standing’, he tells us - where fear commands silence.
 

Track 5: Bob Marley – I Shot The Sheriff
Don’t be fooled by the sweetly hypnotic and gorgeous reggae riddims on ‘I shot the sheriff’; this is social criticism at its best.  As the quintessential amplifier for change, Bob Marley’s words are more widely sung than any other political anthem or party manifesto. Marley’s fable on freedom, with the anonymous Sheriff Brown as the deliverer of a corrupt code of law serving the oppressors of freedom, chimes with anyone who has ever had a rough ride with the law. Marley was always willing to act on institutionalised racism, poverty and corrupt policies and practices through his music. While it may seem that his music has been mostly relegated to garden party DJ sets and hot summer days in the sun, Marley’s powerful words remain a readily accessible dissident voice from the past for all occasions. Wasn’t that always his point?
 

Track 6: Fela Kuti – Coffin For Head Of State
Fela Kuti – human rights activist, multi-instrumentalist, maverick and outlaw –spent a lifetime in song-writing and blistering public attacks that challenged the corrupt military government in Nigeria. This sublime Afrobeat song  – by invoking a religious chorus of “Amens” – mocks the rhetoric of leaders that hide behind religious authorities in committing atrocities against the people they lead. The coffin in the song title refers to Kuti’s publicity stunt where, following the killing of his mother in a military attack on his compound, carried her mock coffin to the gates of the Nigerian military’s headquarters and left it there. Awesome.
 

Track 7: The Jam – The Eton Rifles
Still think that class conflict is a thing of the past? Paul Weller wrote The Eton Rifles in 1979 as a scorning satire of the dishonest and divisive character of class war politics that dominated British society by corrupting social equality and life chances like nothing else. Ironic and sardonic, the Eton provocateurs win the fight before the first verse is even done: ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?’
 

Track 8: Rage Against The Machine – Take The Power Back
The use of education by governments as a selfish weapon of coercion on young people is immediately reminiscent of what became of Hitler Youth in the 1930s and ‘40s.  The American government’s national education agenda that instils a Eurocentric monoculture on young people is at the top of Zack de la Rocha’s rage list. Ignorance has taken over and 'So called facts are fraud'. Today’s lesson plan: ‘take the power back’.
 

Track 9: Metallica – … And Justice For All
Metallica’s most famous exploration in the perversion of justice is shocking, revealing and deeply vengeful long after this nine minute soliloquy is done. The unfairness and purchase of the judiciary are just too much to bear.  Lady Justice has been raped and Truth assassinated. Overpowered and corrupted by money – at the expense of the poor – we no longer seek justice. Justice is simply a vanity project. Now, instead: ‘Winning Is All/ Find it So Grim/ So True/ So Real’.
 

Track 10: Manic Street Preachers – Kevin Carter
The story of Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer winning photography and his suicide is an important hallmark in the poverty of humanity. The horrors that he experienced up close in life – war, famine, death and murder in Africa – are memories that torment our corruptible humanity. The Manics, in making us remember Kevin through their music, are testing our moral obligation to each other in this world. Stripped down into the tragic essence of how we treat each other we are asked directly: what will you do?
 

Track 11: Olu Maintain- Yahooze
Without a hint of irony, Nigeria’s most popular hip hop dancefloor track in recent times takes gangster culture and injects it with wads of illegal online scamming. The cash throwing dance routine of the ‘yahoo yahoo boys’ celebrates advance fee fraud, known as ‘419’ after the legal statute that outlawed it. The ‘yahoo boyz’ anthem is far from satire, as some may believe [6]. The prevalence of quiet corruption in a land of crippling poverty yet contains vast oil reserves [7] is wrought by the seductive “Yahooze” dance in an unsympathetic and flagrant conviviality of hustling culture. The Macarena has certainly met its match.
 

Track 12: Emmerson Bockarie – Yesterday Betteh Pass Tiday (the past is better than the present)
Emmerson’s 2009 dance track sparked one of the fiercest debates on corruption in Sierra Leone in recent times. IPS News [8] informs readers that this popular and low-production song highlights: 'corruption, the high cost of living, nepotism, tribalism, poor service delivery, poor government salaries and a static economy, concluding that things have not changed for the better under the new government. Who could have guessed that a groovy zouk dance track could energise a national debate on good governance better than any dry policy paper…?
 

Track 13: Jamiroquai – ‘Scam’
Fraud has never been more funky. In a one track existential crisis Jay Kay is the ultimate reluctant fraudster. Armed with the rhetorical question and a streetwise conviction we are drawn into his world where fraud meets fraud and corruption is but a synonym for survival: ‘Glued to the screen by a thousand shallow words of wisdom/ It ain't what it seems when it's a single sided system’.
 

Track 14: Dr Hook and the Medicine Show – Cover of the Rolling Stone
Well before Gorillaz there was Dr Hook. And while BBC Radio were forced to rename their song “The Cover of the Radio Times” to avoid trademark infringement reasons, this irreverent folk rock group were always more interested in dealing with the commercialisation of music and the corrupting influence of fame and fortune in the search for it. As the song goes, “Well, we're big rock singers, we got golden fingers and we're loved everywhere we go. We sing about beauty and we sing about truth at ten thousand dollars a show...We got all the friends that money can buy, so we'll never have to be alone. And we keep gettin' richer but we can't get our picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone..."
 

Track 15: Star Wars – Imperial March: science fiction becomes reality, as chosen by Silvio Berlusconi
And finally - earlier this year, in what can only be described as a deliciously ironic prelude to John William’s Imperial March, The Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi proposed to change the constitution by referendum to give him powers as a “directly elected president” at a rally in Rome staged under the slogan “Love always wins over envy and hatred” that blazed to the soundtrack of Star Wars. What’s the harm in dabbling in some science fiction when it comes to taking over TV stations and nepotism at the top of public life? SF fans have waited in agony long enough. Will the real “emperor”** please stand up?
 

And there it is! 15 tracks of anti-corrupt magic. Now just click on the Spotify [4] and YouTube [5] links here and let the set up playlists do all the work for you...

Words: Tony K Daly
Photo: Flickr user futureatlas.com

Note: Unfortunately we were unable to gain Spotify access to four artists on the list (Mos Def, Metallica, Olu Maintain and Emmerson Bockarie). But as it's a collaborative playlist, add any extras you fancy, or just check up the YouTube link.

Interested in info on getting involved in Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s anti-corruption projects? Keep reading:

- Take part in our letter writing campaign [9] with anticorruption organisation Mars Group Kenya
- Pick up a copy of our limited edition Unmasks Corruption comic book [10] from our online shop which seeks to engage and challenge the issues of social injustice in a bid to politicise a new generation of activists through the medium of popular comic culture.