Propagandhi

Feb 11th PiH/Zanmi Lasante Fundraiser in Winnipeg

Con­sid­er­ing the far­ci­cal attempts to dress up mil­i­tarism in human­i­tar­i­an cloth­ing, real grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty based options to assist the relief effort in Haiti are need­ed more than ever.

An emer­gency relief fundrais­er has been orga­nized in Win­nipeg on Feb 11^th for Part­ners in Health/​Zanmi Las­an­te’s incred­i­ble efforts in Haiti. Per­form­ers include John K. of the Weak­erthans!! Here are some oth­er events across Cana­da. Dona­tions to high­ly rec­om­mend­ed relief efforts which are actu­al­ly respect­ful of Hait­ian sov­er­eign­ty can be seen here: canada​haiti​ac​tion​.ca …and final­ly, some con­text is pro­vid­ed by the excel­lent and uncom­pro­mis­ing jour­nal­ist and film-mak­er, John Pilger. 

How To Clean, Less Talk digital EP to benefit Partners In Health.

So when I recent­ly com­plet­ed work on three pre­vi­ous­ly unreleased/​unfinished/​unmixed record­ings recov­ered from our How to Clean Every­thing and Less Talk, More Rock mas­ter tapes, me and jordy-boy began talk­ing about releas­ing them pub­licly on a dona­tion basis to cov­er the costs of recov­er­ing the tapes and to hope­ful­ly make a finan­cial con­tri­bu­tion to a pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ty ini­tia­tive that reflect­ed our core values. 

About the same time we were mulling poten­tial ben­e­fi­cia­ries over, news began rolling in about a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter unfold­ing in Haiti. 

There’s no good place for a 7.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake to hit, but Haiti, the West­ern Hemi­sphere’s poor­est (and most inter­fered with) nation, is def­i­nite­ly one of the worst. 

Accord­ing to the Cana­da-Haiti Action Net­work, the ​“ille­gal coup of 2004 (sup­port­ed by the Cana­di­an, French and US gov­ern­ments) has had an extreme­ly neg­a­tive impact on Haiti’s social fab­ricbreak­down in gov­ern­ment ser­vices, includ­ing edu­ca­tion and health care; increased pover­ty; decline of agri­cul­tur­al production…”

…so the last thing the peo­ple of Port-Au-Prince need­ed on top of this con­tin­u­ing for­eign dom­i­na­tion of their coun­try was a 7.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake to add to their misery.

In imme­di­ate terms, we obvi­ous­ly encour­age peo­ple who want to help, to con­tact a trust­ed, pro-democ­ra­cy aid orga­ni­za­tion direct­ly. We rec­om­mend Part­ners in Health. PIH are a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion whose mis­sion is to pro­vide a pref­er­en­tial option for the poor in health care, specif­i­cal­ly in Haiti. They were one of the groups we direct­ed income to dur­ing the ini­tial release of Sup­port­ing Caste and you peo­ple stepped up. 

Hope­ful­ly you will again. 

As a small but sin­cere ges­ture of sol­i­dar­i­ty — and in the spir­it in which the songs were orig­i­nal­ly record­ed — we’ll release these three vin­tage tracks as a dig­i­tal down­load in late March and donate any prof­its to Part­ners in Health to help them con­tin­ue their mis­sion in the after­math. Stay tuned. 

thanks.

Kent Monkman Wins!

Kent Monkman, the artis­tic genius who gen­er­ous­ly let us use his ​“Tri­umph of Mis­chief” paint­ing on the cov­er of Sup­port­ing Caste, has earned him­self a nod on an album-cov­er-of-the-year list! Well deserved! 

Copenhagen...

Hel­lo par­ty people. 

So many of you who came out to any of our North Amer­i­can shows in the past cou­ple of years may remem­ber our pal Josh from the Rain­for­est Action Net­work, who stepped up to the mic before we played each night to let peo­ple know about the envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe known as the Tar Sands project in Cana­da. Many of you spoke with him at the shows. 

Well, Josh has been busy on the front­lines at the Cli­mate Sum­mit in Copen­hagen, resist­ing state intim­i­da­tion and vio­lence to put pres­sure on pol­i­cy-mak­ers to stop the freaks who pre­fer mon­ey to a sus­tain­able future from con­tin­u­ing acts of total ecocide. 

Check it out.

Fuckin A Josh! 

2009, the year in review...

well my friends, what a year it is has been for us on this crazy, con­fused plan­et. it’s been 23 years since me and jord start­ed Pro­pa­gand­hi and in many respects, 2009 has turned out to be one of the most inter­est­ing and reward­ing years of them all. 

not only did we man­age to final­ly share the stage with some of the bands that actu­al­ly inspired us to start Pro­pa­gand­hi back when we were teenagers in the mid-80’s — Bad Brains, Sac­ri­fice, Cro­mags (ok, not the same stage per se, but same fes­ti­val still counts!), SNFU (ok, well, we shared the stage with Chi Pig for 30 sec­onds when he walked up out of nowhere dur­ing our set and kissed me on the cheek still counts!), Clive Jones from Black Wid­ow and the mighty MDC, we toured with some real­ly great ​“new” bands com­prised almost exclu­sive­ly of awe­some peo­ple: Paint it Black, Bridge and Tun­nel, The Rebel Spell, Protest the Hero and Strike Any­where to name but a few. Cheers to all of them! 

Cheers also to the liv­ing freaks who have been insane enough to hitch a ride on our three-ring-cir­cus as it bum­bled across the plan­et: Kee­bler, Bar­ney Barn­yard Barn­hole Red Nuts Barnabus, Ethan, Eton, Mr. D Hugill, Philippe ​“Fleep” Trem­blay and Dewey D. Jack­son have been brave enough to endure us on the road. Back home, Jason, Rob and Ruben try to make sense of our con­flict­ing wish­es and then bear the brunt of the inces­sant whin­ing when they man­age to make those wish­es come true. i send sin­cere thanks to them. None of it would have hap­pened — none of it — with­out them. 

But among all the remark­able events that 2009 pro­vid­ed, none can com­pare to what hap­pened on Sep­tem­ber 5^th, when my son Fran­cis-Riel Voy­ager arrived — with appro­pri­ate dra­ma — on the 32^nd anniver­sary of the lift off of the Voy­ager 1 space-probe. His cos­mic name­sake car­ried with it music, images and greet­ings in over 50 lan­guages from earth­’s incred­i­ble diver­si­ty of cul­tures on a gold­en phono­graph record. Here in 2009 — the Inter­na­tion­al Year of Astron­o­my — as Voy­ager 1 now approach­es the known bound­ary of our solar sys­tem, we hope to send Fran­cis out into the fron­tier of an indi­vid­ual life in the same spir­it.

it’s a cold, hard world, but it’s also beau­ti­ful, full of love and poten­tial and worth strug­gling to save from the sociopaths that dom­i­nate it. 

peace to every­one, everywhere.

One week until the UK and Ireland!!

We’re in our final prepa­ra­tions for our jour­ney to the UK and my sweet Ire­land on Sat­ur­day. This jour­ney is going to be a good one. We’ve been prac­tic­ing hard and seem to be on track to melt some bananas! Join­ing us for some chaos on this tour tour are Protest The Hero, Strike Any­where and Oi Pol­loi (in Edin­burgh)! We have been con­vers­ing with The Dev­il. He men­tioned to us that if you chant hard enough he may even make it up for an appearance..

See you soon! As always, bring your hel­met in case the walls crum­ble and fall on your lit­tle skull.

Eh!