Recorded with my phone. Written for a friend.

I can feel you wondering why
You've already a song for every star in the sky
But if you turn your gaze to the earth
You might find you've got a piece of my mind

You follow the road down to Tulsa
to learn what you might find
The weather's just fine up in Wisconsin
but that won't do
I have made up my mind
I won't be left behind
Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

Virgo - ISS

episode 6 from iamamiwhoami's third audiovisual album BLUE
http://towhomitmayconcern.cc/releases/twimc004

watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyNOy_BjpQA

available in exclusive digital and physical formats from the TWIMC SHOP http://shop.towhomitmayconcern.cc/collections/iamamiwhoami-blue

BLUE

thin

WANT

iamamiwhoami; thin

Hey! This is my track Leaves, premiered by Jaguar. Hope you enjoy the playful melodies and ideas in this track. It is now available for download via bandcamp.

Support Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/SizzleBird

Artwork by:
Alex Haldi
http://alexhaldi.com
Wendy Bird
http://www.saatchiart.com/account/profile/195683

Spotify

Leaves

(๑ ऀืົཽ₍₍ළ₎₎ ऀืົཽ)✧ 'Get Happy' is a song we recorded one day in January 2014 but laid to rest as we got lost in the commotion of touring and moving to separate cities. As the year progressed, we found our live show intensify but still had all these softer recordings which would never be released. Hence we present Get Happy / Get Happier, where we explore both sides: the original demo and a fun, double-time edit made one day in August.
o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡╮༼;´༎ຶ.̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̸̨̨̨̨̨̨̨̨̨̨̨̨.̸̸̨̨۝ ༎ຶ༽╭o͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡



Get Happy

Somewhere, our limbs lost in the distance.

Watch the film: https://vimeo.com/77703019

Somewhere

///lyrics///
And you,
Never called,

And you,
Never called,

And you,
Never called at all.
///

You Never Called

Jak:3