It’s pretty safe to say that 2016 saw the birth (or real emergence) of a culture that’s merciless, cruel, and violent. People are out there getting killed in the name of a war against drugs, nobody cares that the right to due process is violated, and desperate citizens are now romanticizing motherflippin’ Martial Law and the family that made it all happen.
Everybody’s doing their best to document all the bad shit happening, but it feels like the people who speak out against it are never enough. We need more pieces of art like NINNO’s new music video for his song “Simmer,” off his record Third Culture Kid.
Released just before the new year, the video touches on a lot of things wrong with what’s happening in the country. Ninno portrays a bunch of victims while rapping the verses of his song, such as a dead activist in the Martial Law era, a soldier in the middle of battle, and an ordinary citizen killed in the war on drugs. Each portrayal is Ninno chillingly giving life to the most important line in “Simmer”‘s hook: One minute you’re alive, the next second you’re ice.
It’s a reality that, as the second half of 2016 has shown, could happen to us at just about any moment. As far as we know, very few artists have used this imagery so far in the post-Duterte Philippines, so Ninno’s one of the brave few to speak up the way he did. Good show, good sir.
Check out the rest of Ninno’s record on iTunes or Spotify.