Social Conscience In A Paper Bag: How a Turkish band is pushing back
It’s not every day a band does a massive collaboration to elevate people’s understanding of the social issues of the day. Less often still is using a paper bag distribution system to get the word out. Turkish band In Hoodies is doing just that.
Last month Murat Kılıkçıer (who records and performs under the name “In Hoodies”) released a song called “Coo Coo”. It is released by Epic İstanbul, a subdivision of Sony Music Turkey. The song is released via special made paper bags. We left nearly 10.000 paper bags to independent record stores, coffee shops, markets, independent design stores … basically to anywhere that we think the work might reach to people, create a real bond and make them think about it.
On the paper bag, there is a link that leads you to a dropbox file which contains collaborative works of 20 artists. Apart from the physical materials made for the song, there are videos, illustrations, photographs, gifs and texts inside the link. It would mean a lot to us if you check the link when you have time.
We wanted to share this with you cause it is a massive collaboration which has ecological, political and social concerns. We don’t want to dramatize our situation but you would guess it was very hard to make this kind of multi-layered art project in a country that is ruled by autocracy nowadays.
They are painting a picture of the state of the world to try to increase awareness:
The song itself and all the visuals and materials created around the track have a sense of impending disaster. The song talks about ecological concerns, social problems, and political madness. Slavery still exists in different forms. Exploitation of nature, animals, and humans on an increasing scale, global warming, mass murders all point out to the fact that the lifestyle we’ve chosen is not sustainable.
The official video of Coo Coo starts with footage related to slavery and includes many examples of the manufacture of consent as well as historical moments and symbols of riot and denial. Whales beaching themselves, bison hunts, workers on low wages without social security, refugees captured and sold for their organs, destroyed rain forests, poisoned oceans… Our planet is ringing the alarm bells. As mankind constantly tries to oppress the weak and the outsider, we watch our species wrapped in plastic, hardly breathing. We witness our shelf life coming to an end with our own choices.
As we hear the screaming sirens, we repeat the comforting chorus;“LaLaLa”, just like somebody who avoids hearing the things he doesn’t want to hear. The material created around the single emphasize our efforts of self-relaxation, our attempts to stay close to normalcy and keeping on our self-centered lives, in this ending world order. Fake make up tutorials to reach the society’s beauty standards, clothing designs to hide social anxiety, fake products like mouth guards for bruxia or flyers of pest control companies fighting with unwanted musicians… products that don’t do anything about the problem but try to mask the consequences are already part of our daily life.
Read more here. The various files available for download can be found here.
