Tag Archives: politics

“We tend to forget that censorship is around us” – an interview with Ole Reitov

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Ole Reitov is the program manager of Freemuse, the World Forum on Music & Censorship. Freemuse, founded in 2000 in Denmark, acts as an information and monitoring platform. They have put in place a number of strategies in order to alert the media, politicians and the people at large of the abuses of censorship (Babel Med guide).  Journalist Jaïr Tchong had an interview with Reitov during Babel Med Music conference in Marseille, March 2013.

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Gangnam Style and politics

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The K-pop song “Gangnam Style” rocketed straight to the top of the charts in more than 30 countries.  The video on YouTube has been viewed almost 600 million times. Korean rapper, dancer, and producer Psy (Park Jae-sang) shows us a caricature of the life of Gangnam district, the Beverly Hills of Seoul.  The catchy phrases “oppa Gangnam style” and “hey sexy lady”, the electronic dance beat, and the silly galloping moves are the main ingredients for this huge success.  There is a vast amount of parodies of the video, and of Gangnam Style in particular. Not only the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei uses this song to make political comments, but also persons like Ban Ki-moon, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Noam Chomsky are involved in one way or another.

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“In France I found my Tunisian identity”- an interview with Emel Mathlouthi

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Antwerp – It looks like Tunisia, where the Arab Spring started, had a successful transition to democracy. Ben Ali has fled the country and the moderate Islamist party Ennahda won the elections in October 2011. They allegedly take Turkey as an example; a secular democracy governed by a party with an Islamic identity. Lately, however, there have been tensions between Islamicists and secular liberals and the economy is still very fragile. In April the government puts a ban on demonstrations which generated new protests (New York Times). This weekend at the Sfinks Festival in Boechout, Belgium, I spoke to the Tunesian singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi, currently living in France, about Tunisia and her music.

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