Pussy Riot’s new song pays tribute to Eric Garner
- Text by Alex Taylor
Russian punks Pussy Riot have released their video for ‘I Can’t Breathe’, a tribute to Eric Garner’s death at the hands of American police officers on July 17, 2014. The song is the band’s first in English and shows them being buried alive dressed in police uniforms as the ‘Industrial Ballad’, a term that the band have used to described the track, drones over them.
It should come as no surprise that Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, who spent time in prison for openly criticising Vladimir Putin, have made the video after joining protests to denounce police violence against African-American men that has seen the deaths of Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice in the last year alone. The track also features Richard Hell, an early pioneer of punk music fashion, voicing over the words that became synonymous with the protests following Garner’s death as well as Nick Zimmer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It is Hell’s first musical performance since the 1990s, report Rolling Stone, as he lept at the chance to be involved with the record.
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