Indigenous choir Spinifex Gum perform Dream Baby Dream – video // Dreaming of a voice to parliament: Spinifex Gum sing their way into stony hearts

By Dilip -
Indigenous girls' choir Spinifex Gum perform Dream Baby Dream, a musical project collaboration with the Cat Empire’s Felix Riebl at the 2019 Garma festival. The protest song calls on Australians to support the Uluru Statement from the Heart and establish an Indigenous voice in the constitution. They will be presenting their vocal petition in Canberra on 8 September..  listen:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/video/2019/sep/05/indigenous-choir-spinifex-gum-perform-dream-baby-dream-video

 'Spine-tinglingly beautiful': Indigenous youth choir perform at Parliament House – video

Dreaming of a voice to parliament: Spinifex Gum sing their way into stony hearts
One evening in March last year the young women who sing together in Spinifex Gum stepped off the stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre to a standing ovation. As the audience began to shuffle out, a woman started speaking to the stranger pressed in beside her, but her sentence was cut short by emotion.The stranger put a hand on her arm and said, “My daughter was singing up there.” 

Soon, they were both crying. Spinifex Gum’s music is no ordinary choral fare. It is full of the exuberance of youth, underwritten by basslines that would feel at home on a Beyoncé album. The songs’ subject matter is similarly unsanitised, tackling issues from deaths in custody to the effect of mining on communities. “My passion for singing and culture and family and mob, they’ve allowed me to be a part of this project,” says 16-year-old Spinifex Gum singer Georgiana Thomas-Peddell, a mainland Torres Strait Islander, with descendants from Mabuiag and the Kaurareg nation. “[It] opened up opportunities to share these truths and protest these injustices and systemic failings that continue to affect First Nations people.”

Spinifex Gum’s self-titled first album was released in 2017; their second, which comes out later this year, includes lead single Dream Baby Dream – a Bruce Springsteen cover performed in English and, thanks to translation from Michael Woodley, Yindjibarndi language. Featured on the single alongside the choir are the voices of more than 10,000 Australians who have recorded themselves singing as part of an ongoing online petition by the band, calling for a First Nations voice to parliament to be enshrined in the constitution….
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/05/dreaming-of-a-voice-to-parliament-spinifex-gum-sing-their-way-into-stony-hearts

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