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| AP Photo/Denis Sinyakov |
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“I Can’t Breathe” is the title of a new song released Feb. 18 by the Russian political punk group Pussy Riot protesting the killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island last year by New York City cop Daniel Pantaleo. The song has two videos, one showing band members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (left) and Maria Alyokhina, both of whom spent nearly two years in prison for a protest against the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, being buried alive wearing Russian riot police uniforms. The other shows protests in New York against the chokehold killing of Garner. The song closes with U.S. musician Richard Hell reading the final words Garner said to police, ending with “I can’t breathe” over and over.
The song is a collaborative effort with several Russian and American musicians. “Pussy Riot’s first English song is dedicated to those who can no longer breathe,” Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina wrote in an email interview published in Billboard magazine. “To Eric Garner and to all who suffer from state terror — killed, choked, perished because of war and police violence — to political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for change.” They said the “bloody war in Ukraine, fueled and controlled by Russia,” led Pussy Riot to decide to record a series of anti-war songs, of which this is the first. They were in New York working on that project in December during “huge demonstrations in memory of Eric Garner, racism and police violence. And we were in the heart of these demonstrations.” |
| — NAOMI CRAINE |