Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Telegram Live Sex ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register

Strength Through Music, 2018. (official thing) (Patreon)

Published:
2018-03-01 04:06:40
Imported:
2023-06

Content

(public post)

hello loves.

it's late at night here. hope you're there. i know you're kinda there, because i've been poring over your 550 in-depth comments from the post the other day about All Things Patreon and tiers and business. but if i may excuse us from the business for a moment....to talk about the world.

this Thing wasn't planned. it started happening today at 4 pm (new york time). i had sent an email to michael pope, the original director for the "strength through music" video i put out in 2008 when Who Killed Amanda Palmer came out. i'd gone to share the video it on the internet a few days ago...i was going to write something more about what was happening in the insane world of guns, america, and kids in schools dying on a daily basis. but i wasn't happy with it.

the song "strength through music" had been written as a response to the shootings at columbine. it wasn't an out-and-out message song, it was more a requiem for the entire situation - the shooters, the dead, the disconnect. the way i imagined the shooters putting on their headphones and treating their fellow human beings like targets in a fucking video game, instead of like...human beings.

we shot the video, with students, at my alma mater, lexington high school. i actually walk by my old locker (it's on the right).

i love the original video deeply, and i do love the song, but it's always bothered me. when i was in the studio with ben folds, making "who killed amanda palmer" all those years ago (11 years, fuck), i was obsessed with a surreal online cartoon called "strindberg and helium". the day before i worked on "strength through music" with ben (and our engineer, joe costa) i'd showed the video in the control room and we'd all laughed our asses off at the silliness and sadness of it. it was my bright idea the next day to pop a sample from it onto the beginning of the song. i still, to this day, am not sure why i did it. i just liked the sound of it. and so...i did it, because there was nobody there to stop me. 

a few months later, after i'd shot and scripted the video with michael pope, i found myself sort of regretting the sample. but it was far too late at that point. it was just going to have to stand as a sort of weird enigma.

when i went on a world tour to promote "who killed amanda palmer" with the danger ensemble - a group of 4 australian actors and 1 australian violinist - we started the song with the story of columbine. then the piano, and then the violinist, lyndon chester, reading out the names of the kids murdered at columbine - and where, and how, they were murdered. then the actors walked across the stage, in school uniforms, with their hands on their heads, and, at the end of the song, fell silently. it was one of the most powerful moments of the show. here's some footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpA_IVDApvQ 

i found myself wishing i could go back and fix the video to be that powerful.

cut to today, february, 2018.

i called pope and we started talking about all of this.

he looked through his hard drives.

he found the original footage.

i called my friend in town, marco benevento, who has a decent recording studio and mic, to see if he was home and could maybe do a quick vocal. while i raced over there, hayley put together a list of names. an hour later i recorded them, while pope used the original instrumental version of the song to create a new track.

here's me at marco's earlier today, recording the names.


and marco, tracking.


the names are the victims from parkland/stoneman douglas, newtown/sandy hook and columbine.

i went to twitter to ask for help sourcing the pronunciation of names from parkland, and somebody sent me this youtube clip of anderson cooper reading off the names and ages of the kids who were murdered...and there i was, sitting in my car outside the recording studio, with a pen in my hand to take notes, and i just started sobbing.

it isn't just these kids. it's kids every day, everywhere. dying. because of guns. guns everywhere.

so. we are putting this video, with a new introduction, back into the world.

because it's time. because enough. 

enough with this. and never again.


PARKLAND, FL:

Gina Montalto.

Peter Wang.

Luke Hoyer.

Chris Hixon.

Alaina Petty.

Meadow Pollack.

Joaquin Oliver.

Helena Ramsay.

Alyssa Alhadeff.

Nicholas Dworet.

Martin Duque.

Luke Hoyer.

Jaime Guttenberg.

Cara Loughran.

Alex Schachter.

Carmen Schentrup.

Scott Beigel.

SANDY HOOK, CT:

Josephine Gay.

Ana M Marquez-Greene.

Dylan Hockley.

Dawn Hochsprung.

Madeline Hsu.

Charlotte Bacon.

Daniel Barden.

Rachel Davino.

Olivia Engel.

Catherine Hubbard.

Chase Kowalski.

Jesse Lewis.

James Mattioli.

Grace McDonnell.

Anne Marie Murphy.

Emilie Parker.

Jack Pinto.

Noah Pozner.

Caroline Previdi.

Jessica Rekos.

Avielle Richman.

Lauren Rousseau.

Mary Sherlach.

Victoria Soto.

Benjamin Wheeler.

Allison N Wyatt.


COLUMBINE, CO

Rachel Scott.

Daniel Rohrbough.

Dave Sanders.

Kyle Velasquez.

Steven Curnow.

Cassie Bernall.

Isaiah Shoels.

Matthew Kechter.

Lauren Townsend.

John Tomlin.

Kelly Fleming.

Daniel Mauser.

Corey Depooter.

Dylan Klebold.

Eric Harris.

please note those last two names. watch the video. there's a point.

oh, and one more thing, while i'm feeling vulnerable about all this: the title.

the title of the song is a dark play on "strength through joy", a horrific german slogan ("kraft durch freude") that refers to the state-operated leisure organization of the nazis. i'll let you go down the terrible wiki hole, if you want, but it was a nod to how obsessed these teenage gunmen are/were with nazi imagery and the like. 

i am officially Thinging this. it's the third thing in a month, so making a smaller amount of dough than the other things because of pledge caps, but it's still a bit of dough, and i am giving every cent of profit to the March For Our Lives, which was created as an uprising response to the ongoing insanity of all this gun violence & is taking place march 24th. and i'll be there - probably in NYC. hopefully we can all march together.

if you want to donate on top, go here: https://www.gofundme.com/8psm8-march-for-our-lives

they are $200k away from reaching their goal, and hopefully the ~$15k that this Thing will generate will help them.

and i hope this is one, small thing that we can do, as artists, as people, as humans who give a fuck. to move the needle some small degree. to stop this madness.

i love you.

here it is. share it. and good luck...i can't watch it without crying.

**WARNING** this may be taken off youtube (you never know). if the youtube link ceases working, please go to vimeo.

the song is up on bandcamp for $1, with all of the proceeds going to the march. i'm also going to send you ALL downloads (every patron, incliding $1 folks) in just a second - watch your inboxes. thanks to the team (esp nick) for putting it all together. it took all day and night.

truly: massive thanks to my team for kicking it into high gear today to get this made, and to michael pope for being home on the right afternoon and finding the hard drive.

these things literally don't happen without the team behind me and the patronage/support of y'all here to pay them for working until literally 11:11 pm, all slaving behind their various computers in brooklyn and philadelphhia. because they are that awesome and they care about the world.

go us.

all one.


and as usual, comment. please. i am reading.

xx

AFP


 

---------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

1. if you’re a patron, please click through to comment on this post. at the very least, if you’ve read it, indicate that by using the heart symbol.

2. see All the Things i've made so far on patreon: http://amandapalmer.net/patreon-things

3. join the official AFP-patron facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/afpland

4. new to my music and TOTALLY OVERWHELMED? TAKE A WALK THROUGH AMANDALANDA….we made a basic list of my greatest hits n stuff on this lovely page: http://amandalanda.amandapalmer.net/

5. general AFP/patreon-related questions? ask away, someone will answer:
patronhelp@amandapalmer.net 

 

Files

Comments

Anonymous

I always assumed that you had George Takei read some obscure lines on alchemy from Shakespeare. Then I googled it and found that. It’s bizarre and I enjoyed it. I think it fits in with the intro of the song. The voice pairs well with the music. Perhaps you were trying to lighten the mood in your mind at the time when you made it was the conclusion I came to.

Anonymous

fuck, dude. this hurt. thank you.

Anonymous

You know, Strength Through Music was my favorite song for a reeeaally long time. I will listen to this again and again and again until I don't feel sad anymore. Thank you.

Anonymous

This was unbeliveably moving and heartwrenching. Thank you. It's hard for me to fathom that I was a teenager when Columbine happened. Seriously, #neveragain.

Anonymous

I live in Clackamas...a very schmoe 'burb of Portland, OR. Surely raising my kids here...letting them walk around the fucking mall would be safe...here...right? No. A few years ago some boy got hold of a gun and began to mow down shoppers. Everyone thinks "Surely, not here"...until it happens to your little town in your little circle. It *has* to stop. I raised two already, and have known the dread of getting the 'school on lockdown' text. Now, my youngest I'm doing online public school. I shouldn't have to be afraid of sending my little one to school as I have been.

Anonymous

Thank you for this. Thank you for caring this much

Amy Tobol

Do you know what an Aeolian Harp is? I made one years ago, a floor standing one as tall as my door, and it sits by the door so that when the wind passes through, it sings. I just played the clip you linked <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpA_IVDApvQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpA_IVDApvQ</a> and as it played, my Aeolian Harp abruptly joined in, and the weirdest bit is that it was exactly in tune with the song. MY HARP PLAYED ALONG WITH YOUR SONG, BY ITSELF. It's only a 9 second clip, a crappy video, by the time I got over to the harp, it had died down, and now the wind is gone for the day. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBqIESwQ3RY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBqIESwQ3RY</a> I'm crying and I don't know what to do about this

Anonymous

It always shocks me to see or hear my little sister's name when I'm not expecting it: for some reason it still surprises me that the murders at Columbine affected people outside of my family. I don't know if I'll ever be at a point where I'm ok with hearing those last two names so close to Lauren's, but I appreciate what you're doing. Thank you.

Anonymous

You made me cry with this video. I always wondered if that's what this song was about when I first heard it. You're doing wonderful things with your art, never doubt that.

Anonymous

there is something i don't get. i watched Heathers nearly weekly in high school. had hated the "cool" crew, well they thought they were cool, hated the my friends, went to a specialized high school, where we were all capable to be taught to be build a bomb (it was an engineering specialized high school), hung out with the kids in trench coats, smoked on my lunch break... i can go on.... but all of us, those bad element kids, sat watching Columbine, jaws dropped. we all had no plans to hurt anyone, we just wanted to grow up and get it on with it. we were angsty, we wore black, god knows what we listened to and watched. hell, wrote, hated, whatever.... but the idea of taking someone life, was too surreal to imagine. Most of us freaks ended up in the service fields nursing, police, social work, teaching, to be more ironic.

Anonymous

This song was always moving, but this re-release... heartwrenching is the best word for it. Thank you.

Anonymous

What I remember most about that day is how completely unsurprised I was. It just seemed inevitable, and had for years. I sometimes wonder what it would have taken to push me over that line in high school: one sympathetic friend? Maybe. Instead I quietly graduated in '91 with a National Merit Scholarship, went on to a useless bachelor's degree, and wound up living on disability. And what *IS* my disability? Best I can figure, I simply cannot process the irrational, and as you're probably aware, the vast majority of human 'rational' thought consists of post-facto justifications for things they did without thinking. A bit of irony: during the unusually (dangerously!) icy autumn of my first year at the U of Iowa, I'd joked that half a dozen people would probably need to be shot before the administration would officially cancel classes for a day. On November 2nd, 1991, Lu Gang shot six people, including himself, leaving the only survivor paralyzed. I would have been in the neighboring building's calculus lab if I hadn't realized at the last moment that I had work that evening. We got a day off. Also: Thanks for including Eric and Dylan. Considering what I went through without exploding, it's painful to imagine all that they must have experienced.

Anonymous
>>10574089

That sounds amazing! Wish I could have been there... what happened is that the harp strings resonated sypathetically with the music as it played. There are quite a few instruments with built-in sympathetic strings just for that purpose (the Norwegian Hardangr or Harding fiddle comes to mind), as well as further variants: the 'drum head' on a banjo works on similar principles, for example. I once read an account of a trumpet player practicing in a college practice room, mystified by the "phantom trumpet" he could hear echoing every single note perfectly, complete with the mistakes. He eventually realized he had, without thinking, been resting his foot on the damper-release pedal of the practice room piano... (Might as well attribute: I read that in *Musical Instrument Design* by Bart Hopkin, a highly informative, delightfully quirky, and pretty darn affordable book that anyone who's actually built an Aeolian Harp would almost certainly appreciate.)

Amy Tobol
>>10574089

It was not resonance, and when I explain how the harp is tuned, you will understand. Amanda's song was playing out of mediocre computer speakers in another room. No chance of enough sound energy perpetuating a sympathetic vibration. When sympathetic tones are generated, they are done so by pushing the strings back and forth, as when the string is plucked or strummed. With an Aeolian harp, the string is responding to eddies in the breeze flowing over the string. The string vibrates around its long axis (think of a button on a loop of string, where you hook your thumbs into the loop at each end and pull so that the button spins in the middle) and harmonics are wrought from the string. (Look up von Kármán vortex street effect.) Your trumpet player found his phantom companion in the piano because all the strings were tuned to different notes, all the notes the player hit had a sympathetic friend in the piano. My Aeolian harp has all it's strings tuned to only one note. If you were to strum it, it would sound boring, all the same note. Only laminar airflow can make the harp sing. If Amanda had been singing in any other key, or if the wind had not been blowing, I wouldn't have had anything to talk about! Edit because I forgot to say thank you for the book recommendation. Good information! I will look for a copy.