This is the fourth installment in “Music Mondays,” a new weekly music column from WHRC, the Bi-Co’s student-run community radio. Featuring music news, album and concert reviews, playlists, recommendations, and more.
Note from the author: This piece responds to a workshop led by Prea Persaud Khanna at Haverford College on Christina Sharpe’s Yale Review essay “Shapes of Grief: Witnessing the Unbearable.” Before you read this article, I ask that you read that work first.
Christina Sharpe’s Shapes of Grief is a series of nineteen vignettes examining how we grieve and what role writers should take during an “ambient genocide,” especially as citizens within the proverbial belly of the beast. The genocide in Palestine, and the reverberating effects of US imperialism, are unbearable and yet, as she writes, “entire populations are being forced to bear it anyway.”
Sharpe’s piece was published in fall of 2024. Since then, the escalation of the unbearable has only continued: per Democracy Now, Israel killed more than three hundred people in Lebanon this Wednesday, and in March the US slaughtered more than a hundred young girls in Minab, Iran. There are countless more brutal and shocking statistics that I could insert here, excluded only for fear of exceeding my word count.
Sharpe asks the question: what should we do as writers, as artists, under these conditions? She answers this question by calling for writers to abandon “Craft”, the “network of sanitizing influences” imposed on us by the demands of the university, propriety, and the linguistic priorities of empire.
My interests lie in how we can apply this to other forms of art. I highlight some musical artists and discuss how they respond, through music, to this “ambient genocide.” This article is by no means exhaustive, but I will invoke two illustrative examples to demonstrate the pitfalls of, as Sharpe writes, “marking” the genocide.
1. The question of material support
I must address the elephant in the room. Macklemore released two songs, “Hind’s Hall” and “Hind’s Hall 2”, in 2024. All of the proceeds went to UNRWA; in the second version, he supplants his own voice to feature Palestinian artists. These two songs represent the most direct musical response from a mainstream Western artist to the genocide in Palestine.
The sticking point here, of course, is that the songs are just not very good. Macklemore is a corny artist, fundamentally — what else can you be, as a white rapper? “Organizin’, unlearnin’ and finally cuttin’ ties with / A state that’s gotta rely on an apartheid system,” he raps.
It’s not so bad as to totally undercut the material impacts of sending money to UNRWA—though it is always more impactful to support those who need it directly. I do not think, ultimately, that Macklemore is up to the challenge of marking a genocide through music. The material benefits that this song may bring about simply do not make up for the lack of artistry.
2. Identity
Can we turn to Palestinian artists to find music that moves through, and marks, the genocide? With Rasha Nahas, a Palestinian singer born in Haifa and now based in Berlin, I say yes. It is critical, though, that her music accomplishes what Sharpe calls work (not Craft) not only because of her identity.
For 15questions in 2023, Nahas said that “creating music means being. And the act of that specific being is resisting patriarchy, apartheid and occupation in the same breath.” Much of the writing surrounding her music, especially since October 7th, surrounds her identity as a Palestinian artist—occasionally to the detriment of covering the actual music.
Nahas is a rock musician. Her music accomplishes what I think Macklemore’s does not, not merely because she is Palestinian; it is the form of her politics. The conditions of displacement, of horrific tragedy, are registered in the sound before they are stated. Her 2024 single “Ghanneeli” (Sing For Me) does not mention Palestine, and does not need to.
This is what Sharpe means by abandoning Craft. Craft would have Nahas make her politics legible, palatable, and explicable. Instead, she makes music from inside the conditions she is living.
Sharpe asks us to redirect our artistic energy towards work, not Craft. She reminds us that to continue producing work that does not witness the genocide is an act tantamount to supporting it. I ask that after reading this article, you reexamine your own work, and ask whether you are witnessing the unbearable or merely writing around it.
