The Alliance has joined Spotify!

A few of our fellows took some time to contemplate how the music they chose for the playlist connects feelingly to the work they do.

Cheryl Smith: I chose “What the World Needs Now is Love” performed by Jackie DeShannon because, on April 4, 1968, Audre Lorde went to see her former students from Tougaloo College perform at Carnegie Hall. The student choir was singing this song when they interrupted it to let the audience know that Dr. King had been murdered. Everyone started to cry. According to Lorde, the choir director said, “The only thing we can do here is finish this as a memorial.” And they sang again, “What the World Needs Now is Love.” Since hearing this story, the song represents resilience and revolution built on a foundation of love, a Beloved Community, and that is what our DEI work means to me.

Gisele Regatao: I chose the song “Siembra” performed by Willie Colón and Rubén Blades because it’s the title track of an iconic album with a great story. Salsa fanatics thought the record was doomed when it came out on Fania Records in 1978. The songs were too long. They bashed American consumerism and instigated Latinos to push for social change. But it became the first salsa record to sell more than one million copies. It’s still probably the best-seller in the genre. I did a piece about the album a few years ago for the national public radio show Studio 360. Interviewing Rubén Blades, who is one of the biggest names in Latin music ever, was definitely a highlight in my career.

David Milch: I added “When I was a Boy” performed by Dar Williams because it always gives me “all the feels.”  Dar is actually an old college friend and so the song brings back personal memories of exploring feminist and queer theory… and practice.  It’s a beautiful story song about a woman remembering when her sex didn’t matter and she was “a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike, riding topless, yeah, [she] never cared who saw.”  In just a few stanzas and with playfully meaningful pronoun use, Dar shares with us the pain and loss all genders experience through narrow socialization… and she does it with a hauntingly simply and beautiful melody and images that recall the joy, hope, and freedom of our youth. 

Pablo Peixoto: I chose “YáYá Massemba” performed by Maria Bethânia. This song by Sergio Mendes and immortalized by this performance imagines the origins of Brazilian samba through the despair, the solitude, the humanity, and the fortitude of enslaved Angolans en route to colonial Brazil. A child born and growing up in the dark holds of a slave ship contemplates the long nights, the spins of the Earth, the deep ocean, the waves drumming like the beating of a bird’s heart in captivity. The samba growing in his heart to quench his solitude, his pain, his fear, and to summon justice through his ancestral gods Oxossi and Xangô.

The final verse “Vou aprender a ler, pra ensinar meus camaradas” – I will learn to read, so that I can teach my compatriots – is one of the reasons why I became a teacher. 

Check them all out here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/5jMD4s3yi6uK5mErvRv969?utm_source=generator