Norwegian singer-songwriter Pål Moddi Knutsen weathered a time when he “lost faith in music as a weapon,” but uncovering the power of songs once suppressed and the stories behind them opened new doors that drew him to discover that politics, too, can be beautiful, and that music, even if censored, is stronger than silence.
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Moddi considers himself a storyteller rather than a musician, and telling stories is exactly what he has tried to do with his latest album “Unsongs,” a collection of 12 songs from as many different countries that have been censored or banned in some way over the years. For Moddi, the power lies not in the songs themselves — which range from classics by U.S. jazz sensation Billie Holiday, Chilean folk icon Victor Jara, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to lesser-known gems — but in the stories behind them.
“I wanted the whole spectrum,” he told teleSUR, adding that the 12 songs are aimed at encompassing what music censorship is, from the well-known to the obscure.
The inspiration for “Unsongs,” which will be released Friday, came after Moddi canceled a concert in Tel Aviv in 2014, refusing to lend credence to the expansion of Israeli settlements in Palestine. “Silence can sometimes be stronger than music,” he wrote on his website. But after the cancellation, Moddi says he felt “completely helpless” with his music in the face of stronger forces.
Norwegian artist Pål Moddi Knutsen
Another Norwegian artist, Birgitte Grimstad, reached out to Moddi to share a song she had been banned from singing decades earlier. “Eli Geva” told the story of a dissident Israeli officer who defied orders to lead his troops into the besieged city of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War, making him a hero among pacifists and villain among war-mongers. Grimstad was bullied out of performing the song in Israel the same year Geva took his historic stand, and the song remained unsung for 33 more years — until Moddi found it.
“I fell completely in love with it, the story was so strong,” Moddi said of his discovery of “Eli Geva,” adding that it opened his imagination in new ways. “It made me question: when one song can be so powerful and so beautiful at the same time and still be unheard, what other censored songs might be out there that I haven't heard?”
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The question propelled him to seek out similar unsung songs, a quest that quickly morphed from a sideproject to a full-scale album. The second track that caught Moddi’s attention after “Eli Geva” and made the cut for the album was Victor Jara’s “Plegaria a un Labrador,” which he reinterpreted as “The Our Worker.”
“I've included it because I want to tell people that although Victor Jara is symbol of artistic suppression, a symbol of censorship, a symbol of the whole album, he is just the tip of the iceberg,” Moddi explained, adding that Jara’s musical and lyrical genius and that way his song sheds light on critical history also informed the choice.
Modeled on the Christian Lord’s Prayer, Jara’s “Plegaria a un Labrador,” one of his most renowned songs, called on Chilean social movements and labor unions to unify in their struggles for justice and equality. Moddi’s interpretation sets Jara’s song to faster-paced, upbeat pop music, but stays true to the song’s basis as a prayer, with lines such as: “Lead us not to misery, deliver us from domination; kingdom of fairness and justice for all, kingdom come.”
Moddi said he hopes that the Victor Jara track, like the other covers, can unlock the music for new listeners.
“I know he is famous, he was censored but he hasn't been unheard, he hasn't been forgotten in any way,” he said. “But still, young people of the West today might have heard the name but they probably haven't heard the music. This might be a good introduction to it … and make them want to dig deeper.”
A folk singer, poet, teacher, and left-wing political activist, Victor Jara was among the thousands of people rounded up by military intelligence agents in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 U.S.-backed coup that ousted Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator for the next 17 years. Dictatorship operatives herded Jara and other activists into the sports stadium in Santiago, where they tortured and interrogated them. After electrocuting him and breaking his guitar-playing hands, the army murdered Jara on Sept. 16, dumping his dead body, riddled with 44 bullet wounds, in a poor Santiago neighborhood in a chilling symbol of what was only the beginning of Pinochet’s bloody and violent repression.
Jara pioneered a new era of Chilean folk music known as “Nueva Cancion,” or “New Song,” and is one of the most celebrated folk and protest music icons in Latin America, and the world. According to ethnomusicologist Julio Mendivil, professor at Goethe University Frankfurt, although groundbreaking musical contributions as one of the first artists to “fuse traditional forms with rock elements” and incorporate local Andean instruments into popular Chilean folk music, his most palpable impact has been as a political symbol.
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“His unjust death made him into an emblem of the struggle for justice,” Mendivil told teleSUR. “His legacy, in my opinion, is most reflected in his attitude as a musician toward society than in his specific musical influence.”
As part of putting together the album, Moddi dug deep into the stories behind the songs. Last year he traveled to Chile, where he met with former band members of Inti-Illimani and Quilapayun, two iconic Chilean folk groups of the “Nueva Cancion” movement whose music at the time was closely intertwined both with Victor Jara's work, as well as the Allende government's socialist revolution.
Moddi also visited the stadium in Santiago where Jara was tortured and finally murdered. The facility was later renamed Victor Jara Stadium in the slain musician's honor. A chilling and raw touch to Moddi's cover of Jara's song fittingly comes from that very place. The song opens with the muffled hum of cars driving by, a sound sample captured from the basement of the stadium that was used as a torture center in the darkest chapter of Chile’s history.
"The atmosphere down there is so gloomy," Moddi recalled. "I needed to have it on the album."
Despite its dark history, many others have been able to sing in the same place where Jara was silenced, as the stadium has hosted concerts of a number high-profile international artists over the years. Eileen Karmy, PhD researcher in music at the University of Glasgow, told teleSUR that the building once housed the “joyful commitment to social change” represented in the first “Nueva Cancion” festival hosted at the stadium back in 1969, when Jara’s “Plegaria a un Labrador” was first released. But the stadium was later shrouded in “suffering and injustice,” imbuing it with a “powerful and paradoxical meaning.”
Karmy argued that present-day concerts offer a “gesture of remembrance” and are a “valid way to maintain the memory alive, coexisting with the present.”
Similarly, for Mendivil, reclaiming the site of historic henious acts as the place of culture it was intended to be also represents a “victory of life over death.”
“The stadium is by nature a space of entertainment. The Chilean army alienated it, making it a space of torture and horror,” Mendivil said. “Every new concert is a victory of that affront to life.”
Jara, whose alleged killer Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez was recently found liable for his murder in a civil trial in Orlando, Florida, became one of the most prominent symbols of Chile’s U.S.-backed “Dirty War” that terrorized leftist artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1970’s and 80’s. His politically-charged music has inspired a generation of political activists and musicians, including Chilean hip hop artist Ana Tijoux and singer-songwriter Nano Stern, among many others.
Moddi is now newly on the list as well, recreating one of Jara’s songs in English while striving to preserve to its original essence. For the Norwegian artist, Jara’s music, with its powerful messages and simple but beautiful melodies, is “extremely adaptive” to other musical cultures.
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Mendivil argued that the continued reinterpretation of Jara’s music underlines the ongoing relevance and strength of his legacy. “When music permeates within the people, the songs remain,” he said.
Karmy said that new versions of Jara’s music, like Moddi’s, aren’t only a testament to the Chilean folks singer’s political, social, and artistic significance, but also serve as “crossovers that can reach diverse people, from different generations and social classes.” Even when artists are “from countries that seem so distant from Chile,” like Moddi, their covers offer a window into Jara music and legacy, she said.
For Moddi, the survival alone of Jara’s popular protest music after 17 years of dictatorship, censorship, and brutal repression of all forms leftist expression under the Pinochet regime is a testament to the fact that the songs and their messages are “completely unbreakable.”
Other tracks on Moddi’s album include Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer,” Kate Bush’s “Army Dreamers,” Mahmoud Darwish’s “Oh My Father I Am Joseph,” and a 19th century song of the Indigenous Sami people of Norway called “The Shaman and the Thief,” among others.
But underlining the fact that Moddi’s mission was to tell the stories behind music censorship, not all the tracks champion a political message he endorses. The only other song from Latin America on the album aside for Victor Jara’s, for example, is a Mexican “narcocorrido,” a genre that glamorizes drug trafficking through traditional Mexican folk ballads. Like other narcocorridos that achieve “anthem” status, the 1995 ode to cocaine, marijuana and heroin called “Mis Tres Animales” by the group Los Tucanes de Tijuana was banned from Mexico’s airwaves.
“It seems to me that banning narcocorridos, drug ballads, is just a way of steering attention away from what the politicians are doing,” said Moddi. “Making the musicians into scapegoats instead of focusing where the focus should be, on the people in power.”
Moddie says that with all 12 tracks of “Unsongs,” of which he can’t choose a single favorite, the main goal is simply to make the once-unheard music heard again, leaving it up to listeners to decide that they make of it.
“I think that these are stories that are important and beautiful,” said Moddi. “You can find many Victor Jaras in the world today.”