Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by Cheryl Waters, host of The Midday Show on KEXP, is "NO News on TV" by Noga Erez, a 2020 single on City Slang.
With today's Song of the Day, Tel-Aviv based artist Noga Erez teams up with her partner Ori Rousso to reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic. In a press statement, she shares:
This song was written during a period where I had more time than I've had in a decade. I was able to sit down and work my ass off on new music without any emails disturbing the silence. No notifications, nothing. I wanted to write a song that talked about that. I felt a deep need to imagine what it would be like to live in a world with no politics, money, grit, racism, or violence.
As I write these words people in America and all over the world are fighting for justice for the black community. It’s tragic and saddening that in this day and age we still have to deal with racism. But this fight is so extremely important, not just for the black community in the US but for any person who suffers from oppression and mistreatment. The world couldn’t have been more opposite than the world that I’ve imagined while sitting in the silence of my apartment in a shutdown city during lockdown.
I call this song 'a children's song for adults' because it shows a naive, utopian reflection of reality. I just needed to have a song like that. An escape song. But what was an escape song to me a few months back became an absurd, critical, and provoking song to me. It now sounds to me more like a frantic search to close myself off and separate myself from the real world. This isn’t time for escaping, it’s a time for confronting. And I am happy that this song was able to transform into a new form of actually giving a true, honest, and criticizing perspective on the need for apathy and escapism.
My pure daydream fantasy became an eye-opener. Singing about how ‘everybody’s free’ right now is such an incredible dissonance for me. It says exactly what it needs to say: not everyone is free. Actually most of us aren’t, but some of us are literally, physically not free. And that has to change fast.
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