Download Haviah Mighty’s powerful song ‘Atlantic’

This week’s download comes from Haviah Mighty. You have seven days to download her song “Atlantic.”

From the press release:
Mighty Prynce created this ominous, percussion-driven production and the moment he showed me, I knew I wanted to write to it. The melodic mood of the instrumentation felt almost hopeless, a feeling of despair in the flute that cries on top of the repetitive guitar chords, strumming a minor lick. I went into the songwriting process channeling these sensations, and resonating with the hopelessness my ancestors must have felt, and how that hopelessness hasn’t disappeared.
What ties this hopelessness together, past to present, is the concept of money. After all, money is an idea, a perceived identifier of value that was once rooted in the actual value of a commodity – gold. The Atlantic Slave Trade, involving the transportation by slave traders of enslaved Africans mostly to the Americas, existed because of the idea of money. The process of producing/labouring goods for little or no compensation, is the basis of large corporations and conglomerates prospering and why some of these corporations are so successful to this day.
In present day, we still collectively revolve around these concepts of ‘value’ – the importance of it us instrumental to our livelihood – and with the media, misinformation and confusion of history, we labour and produce resources for big companies, and spend our little profits on the same resources our ancestors laboured – gold, diamonds etc. Even a lot of our food is still produced at the expense of marginalized groups of people. This concept that we can’t escape, is so disgusting, and the reason they say ‘money is the root of all evil’.
Specifically, the Atlantic Ocean was used as a vessel of support for these wicked practices, at the expense of my black ancestors. We were forced to come to the Americas to make this idea of value stronger, bigger, better, with very little benefit. Now we are the ‘bottom of the barrel’ in the Americas, a disposition I explore with the lyrics ‘Never seen Atlanta, but we travel the Atlantic’. The singing vocals at the beginning and especially the end, are to represent our ancestors crying out – a reminder that they were so strong, so resilient, and still here, keeping us empowered. Our history is with them, and if we talk to them, learn from them, do our research – we will be stronger.