Earlier this year, Chicago MC Vic Mensa released his powerful track 16 Shots. The track is about Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by police officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014.
On the eve of one of, if not America’s most controversial elections ever, Vic Mensa performed the powerful anti-police brutality track live on Jimmy Kimmel Live He was joined on stage by former Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker.
Mensa began the performance by going a capella to announce and emphasise the message of the song. He then jumped on stage, and while he performed, he engaged in a dramatic struggle against his back-up performers in police riot gear.
In the last minute of his performance Mensa stopped the music and used his platform to deliver a powerful and politically-charged message to everyone to get out there and vote tomorrow:
“I’m a young black man from Chicago, and I’m tired of not being able to trust the police. I want to have faith in the men and women sworn to protect me. I don’t want to see another 17-year-old kid like Laquan McDonald murdered in the street. So when I hear a candidate talking about ‘law and order’ and ‘stop and frisk is the answer to our problems’ – you don’t know our problems in Chicago, and you damn sure don’t speak for us. Tomorrow we have the biggest election of our lifetime, so you gotta get out and vote against hate, because Donald Trump is a racist and if you don’t vote, racism wins.”
Watch the full performance below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAfr5cuJOxE
Image: DJBooth
The prerequisite musical acts that arrive at the end of late-night talk shows is either the moment you switch off (mostly Saturday Night Live) or the moment you look forward to to the most (also mostly Saturday Night Live). There’s only so many variations that can be imagined before you realise the only changes being made are the light placements, and maybe the volume of dry ice. Enter Jimmy Kimmel. Or more specifically: enter Sia via satellite.
As the music portion of SXSW 2016 swung into gear, Sia (or Kristen Wiig) predictably blew everyone away. Performing Bird Set Free replete with her trademark black and white wig and a dancer doing his gosh darned best Chandelier impression. What’s more, the performance was beamed into Jimmy Kimmel Live via her Austin set that closed the three day Samsung’s Galaxy Life Fest, Consequence of Sound reported.
It’s a much more engaging and refreshing approach to what can be achieved in a format that never stops clamouring for audience share. It helps having an artist as brilliant and alluring as the Adelaide singer/songwriter.
Bird Set Free is a single off her seventh album, This Is Acting, that consists of songs initially written for other artists but were rejected, presumably in a deeply sonorous way. It’s a rousing and singularly emotive number that left the crowd in raptures. It continues her recent late-night talk show dominance, like her stint on Saturday Night Live.
According to NME, she also revealed details for her first headline gigs since 2011, playing Coachella in April, Flow Festival in Finland, and Sweden’s Way Out West, both taking place on the same weekend in August.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHZwkZAamHM]
Image: American Songwriter