from the CD Proof of Youth, Memphis Industries, 2007
I spent a while browsing through the many songs in my library that relate to uprisings, or standing strong in the face of adversity, but when played against the backdrop of my mindset on this, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they all seemed contrived and underwhelming within the scope of trying to capture the magnitude of that event. The atrocity of that night in Beijing stands in such stark contrast to the successful revolutions across Eastern Europe later in that year, with the fall of the Berlin Wall coming only 5 months later; the teachers at the school I went to back then were very progressive and had us all make scrapbooks of the magazines and newspaper articles from that year, as well as discussing it in class. I remember thinking what a terrifying thing it must be to know your government will mow you down without hesitation should you stand in their way, or even merely look upon those who do with curiosity. Thankfully there were a handful of brave journalists & camera crews who remained in the hot zone that night (the Chinese demonstrators, mainly college students, formed protective human-shields around the Western press who were there, literally laying down their lives so that the rest of the world could bear witness to history…), providing future generations with a document rooted in reality, as opposed to the Communist Party of China’s official line. In fact, due to their censorship and profound reach of social control, there are no official statistics on the number of people who were murdered that night, but most outside averages fall around 5,000 dead and over 15,000 wounded, many of them onlookers hit by stray bullets which were being fired indiscriminately in all directions. Amazingly (or not if you are a cynical, jaded, grumpy old bastard like myself), due to governmental restrictions regarding any mention of the event and a total dearth of education in their schools about it (Chinese textbooks conveniently forget to mention the whole thing), kids there who have grown up afterwards are largely unaware of what happened; a majority of protestors who weren’t killed or imprisoned fled abroad, fearing for their lives, and rightfully so. Right now, in fact, China has jailed activists, shut down web access to many sites, and banned the foreign press from a radius around Tiananmen Square, all in preparation to hide from the world & their own people any potential dissent. Truly a “phantom broadcast”, I picked this song as an instrumental ode to all those brave souls who sacrificed their lives, whose valor and determination this current generation has to thank for all their freedoms, they will never be forgotten---like the Chinese adage says, “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
