Yo-Yo Ma, Pattie Gonia and Quinn Christopherson made the music video for “Will not Give Up” at Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park.
William Woodward
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William Woodward
Yo-Yo Ma, Pattie Gonia and Quinn Christopherson made the music video for “Will not Give Up” at Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park.
William Woodward
“Will not Give Up” was initially conceived as a requiem — an act of remembrance — for a melting glacier in Alaska.
“We have been standing, all three of us, on Exit Glacier, in a spot the place even 5, ten years in the past, the glacier was 100 toes tall,” stated drag queen and vocalist Pattie Gonia, who collaborated on the track with 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner Quinn Christopherson and famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The trio traveled to the location in Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park to shoot the accompanying music video. “And now it is nothing,” Gonia added. “Now it is the rocks beneath.”
But in contrast to many different tracks reflecting on environmental catastrophe, from Joni Mitchell’s “Massive Yellow Taxi” to Anohni’s “4 Levels,” “Will not Give Up” — as its title suggests — goals to counteract peoples’ emotions of despair on the subject of lowering world warming.
“The truth of local weather change may be very actual, however so are the options and so are the individuals engaged on them,” stated Gonia.
“We’re not going to surrender on nature,” stated Christopherson, an indigenous Alaskan of Iñupiaq and Ahtna descent. “We’re not going to surrender on one another.”
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Melting glaciers — together with rising seas and excessive climate occasions — have turn out to be highly effective visible markers of the worldwide impression of fossil gas consumption, the driving reason behind local weather change. The Nationwide Park Service has been charting the retreat of Exit Glacier for many years.
Ma’s cello solo within the track even evokes the weeping glacier.
“He is taking part in these ethereal harmonics that are lovely and likewise a bit haunting,” stated Nate Sloan, a College of Southern California musicologist and co-host of the pop music podcast Switched on Pop. “And that pressure to me captures one thing concerning the topic of this track, which is preserving this lovely planet we dwell on whereas acknowledging how delicate and fragile it’s and the way shortly it is being threatened.”
Regardless of the track’s connection to melting glaciers, its lyrics do not particularly reference local weather change. Sloan stated the “Will not Give Up” chorus might function a rallying cry for a lot of social actions.
“It is a bit imprecise,” stated Sloan. “It is a bit inspirational, which is maybe what the world wants from a local weather anthem.”
The creators of the track stated the broadness of the messaging is intentional.
“There’s lots of potential for this track to be sung at local weather rallies, to be sung as part of the local weather motion,” stated Gonia. “But in addition for the track to be what it must be and imply what it must imply to different individuals, irrespective of who they’re. If an individual hears it and thinks that it isn’t about local weather however that it is about racial justice or that it is about queer rights, that is lovely. Take it, go for it.”
“Will not Give Up” formally dropped this week. Some contributors in Fairbanks received a sneak preview once they joined the artists for a sing-along at a current neighborhood music workshop.
“Now we have to have the ability to specific these massive feelings so we are able to proceed to take motion and never fall into this pit of despair,” stated workshop organizer Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a board member of Native Motion, an indigenous-led advocacy group in Alaska. (Johnson identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in and Ashkenazi Jewish.) “The track is a lot extra than simply concerning the local weather disaster and our Mom Earth. It’s about our connection as a human species and as a household.”
The musicians stated they hope “Will not Give Up” will turn out to be an anthem for the local weather change motion, as Charles Albert Tindley’s “We Shall Overcome” did for civil rights within the twentieth century and “Quiet” by Milck for girls’s rights within the months following the 2016 presidential election.
Christopherson stated one of the simplest ways to try this is by getting different individuals to sing it.
“It is so that you can sing, to scream, and to bop to,” he stated. “It is simply to be shared.”
