People Not Places: Greatest Hip-Hop Song for Palestine Ever
If you cannot see the video, go to the ETA site.
One word: INCREDIBLE. Invincible, a Detroit-based MC and activist, really hits home with this track, which is artfully weaved into an artistic muso-mentary by Iqaa The Olivetone. It is part of a project, Emergence Travel Agency, which creates “media that resists displacement, gentrification, colonization, occupation, obstruction of movement, denial of the right to leave, and denial of the right to return.”
Suhell Nafar from Dam, and Abeer (aka Sabrina Da Witch), bring their skills to bear on the project.
I heard Invincible perform these lyrics before and the destroyed me then. They were a long time in the writing but as you can see, the finished project is an intelligent and undeniably powerful hip-hop polemic. If there are any Zionist hip-hop heads out there, they won’t be standing after they hear this one.
People Not Places (Detroit, New York, Palestine, 12 min)
Directed by Iqaa The Olivetone
Score by Vaughan T (LABTECHS)
Produced by EMERGENCE and Palestine Education Project
This docu-music-video is based on the song of the same name by Invincible featuring Abeer and Suhell Nafar (DAM). Invincible plays two characters in the video: a Birthright Israel tour recruiter, styled as a used car salesman; and herself, subverting the recruiter’s mission by exposing the buried Palestinian significance of each location in the tour.
Invincible exposes the process of historic and continued colonization of Palestine as being even deeper than land seizure and ethnic cleansing, but one that attempts to erase the indigenous language, culture, and memory of Palestinians.
Intertwined with the music video are interviews that expose how Zionist claims to a Jewish “birthright” to Palestine have come at the expense of the Palestinian Right of Return to their indigenous land. These interviews show how the Right of Return of Palestinians is interconnected with the resistance of occupied and displaced refugee communities globally, from Turtle Island to Puerto Rico and beyond.
People Not Places is featured on Invincible’s ShapeShifters album, available in the EMERGENCE Store.
Read lyrics and explanations for People Not Places.
