What The Project Is

We are focusing on songs of resistance from Civil Rights Movement and its continuation today to create videos that engage viewers in trans-generational issues of violence. We plan to juxtapose lyrics of resistance with footage that highlights police brutality and racial violence in the United States, music and footage from both the past and present. We will juxtapose footage of racial violence alongside protest music from the 1960s-today. Thus, we will confuse the timelines we have established, highlighting, both aurally and visually, the constant injustices that have remained unresolved throughout decades. We will make use of sonic images as well, which are created in both the lyrics and melodic DNA of a song. 

The platform

YouTube is our platform of choice, one of accessibility and dialogue.  YouTube also presents a medium that is easily shared, easily viewed, easily embedded, and easily commented upon. It does not discriminate between social classes,  but it is available to nearly anyone.  The archival implications of YouTube’s platform also ensure that this video will exist online in many spaces, even after this class ends, and that it can still function outside of this class assignment.  We have created our own YouTube channel specifically for this project, enabling us to both collect and organize the music and visuals we plan on using, and also allowing us to collaborate more efficiently as a group to maximize the effort put into this project.

OUr Goals

We want to reshape history, to confuse the way narratives are traditionally told. We wish to emphasize how much work has been left for us from the Civil Rights Movement; despite all the progress made in the twentieth century, the fight is far from over. We attempt to highlight the need for action and call attention to the myth of a post-racist society.  Rather than devalue the important work of civil rights activists in the 1960s and before, we wish to emphasize that the work isn’t finished; many of the issues of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement are relevant and important today.  We are bringing visibility to this issue in a new way — one that has the potential to engage the many generations of viewers. We hope to build upon the conversations around Black Lives Matter by creating an interactive space for feedback and dialogue. 

Who We want to Reach

The music we have chosen to engage with creates an intergenerational appeal that we hope will connect and unite multiple generations of activists and music lovers. We draw from music of many decades (1930s--today), thus inviting generations of activists and listeners to engage with these well-known songs in new ways. We will visually confuse our audience through the manipulation of modern footage in order to make it appear old.  We want audiences to be asking themselves when these images, people, and violence existed, calling into question the perceived understanding that racism in this country was an issue only of the past and has progressed beyond further reparation.

See Some Examples of the kind of adaptation we are attempting