With the world in the mess it is in, a surreal pastiche of what is was only a few years ago and seemingly under the control of the out-of-control I’ve been on the lookout for songs like this and especially those that can be seen to relate directly to events concerning Greenland.
I’m amazed at how so few songs have been written about the debacle there; it is prime material for the activist and the satirist but we no longer have the likes of Dylan, Springsteen, Baez, Seeger, Melanie Safka, Young et al to take up cudgels. They’re either gone or might as well be.
And if you’d told me that the latter day protagonists are a duo going by the name of Strawberry Blonde I would probably have laughed.
But there’s nothing to laugh about here. Strawberry Blonde is a Danish Nordic folk female duo made up of twins Anja and Betina Følleslev that teamed up with American songwriter and producer Andy Davis, and Søren Jacobsen to write “a peace song for a time marked by division” while zeroing in on “polarisation, power displays and hardened positions” and there’s plenty of that going on, from the White House to the Kremlin.
Their entreaty is to let dialogue, empathy and peace be the response to the rhetoric rather than pointing fingers or defining enemies.
“You might show off your power, but we will show up with flowers” is a wonderful line that might have been taken straight out of Haight-Ashbury in 1969.
Their original idea was to write love songs but such was the influence of events that this song emerged instead; one that is in its own way a love song to the world I suppose.
That message is clear. ‘Keep talking’. Find a way. Break the deadlock. Compromise.
And of course those values are transferable to personal lives, too.
I wonder who suggested the military drumbeat that emerges part way through. A clever touch, and so apposite.
To be honest I think the message will fall on deaf ears because in some of these protagonists at least talking is a means to an end, a method of stalling while gaining ground or advantage.
If they sent it to Donald I doubt he would listen.
Melania might.
And where there’s hope there’s a way.
(Continues after the Spotify link).
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