Oil 4 Blood - Lakota Rapper's Sound Track to Keystone Protests
from National Journal:
"We do not want the Keystone pipeline," says Frankie Waln, a Sicangu Lakota hip-hop artist from the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota.(Shadia Fayne Wood/Project Survival Media)
____ Last month's "Reject and Protect" protest in Washington on the Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline included appearances by Neil Young, actress Daryl Hannah, and hundreds of cowboys, Indians, and environmentalists. But only one person came armed with a rap song.
Frankie Waln, a Sicangu Lakota hip-hop artist from the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota, was invited to the protest to perform a set that included the song "Oil 4 Blood," which he wrote about Keystone. The song was written and recorded three years ago, but Waln said it's found "a whole new life" in the past year as the Keystone protests have heated up. Waln, 24, will graduate from Chicago's Columbia College this month studying audio design and production . . .
How did "Oil 4 Blood" come about? Why write a song about Keystone?
This was about three years ago, and I was in my dorm room, and this was about the time Keystone started to be talked about back home. I was on Facebook, and I started seeing photos pop up from a protest at home, where people on my reservation had blockaded a road and were blocking trucks that were carrying pieces of the pipeline. There was one video of Marie Randall, a 92-year-old, and she was speaking to my generation. She was saying, "All we have left is this land. I'm 92 years old, and I'm not going to be out here much longer. Who's going to be out there when I'm gone?" That really spoke to me and cut to my core. So I did the only thing I knew how to do.
What's the main theme of the song?
We do not want the Keystone pipeline. If you look at the chorus, when I say "soil my love," I mean you're destroying the earth. And when I say "my mother," I'm talking about the earth. Our word for nature means mother, so we look at the earth very much the way we look at our mother . . .
read more: http://www.nationaljournal.com/energy/meet-the-native-american-rapper-with-the-sound-track-to-keystone-protests-20140509
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