It’s time to wake up from your post-turkey coma with a kick-ass remix bound to blow your mind and wake your fighting spirit the hell up. I’m talking about the recently released video for the “Singing This Song” remix, featuring the union of Dominican rapper Hache S.T., California native Cambio, and Mexico City’s finest, Bocafloja. The track, originally released on Cambio’s mixtape, Places Unfinished at Creation, released by the Quilomboarte collective, is the rapper’s take on Brother Ali’s original. Cambio’s version continues Brother Ali’s themes of unity in struggle, with the addition of Boca Floja and Hache S.T.’s singing about the struggles of the Latin American community, immigration, and solidarity across borders.
The video, filmed in the streets of Brooklyn and NYC, features the three rappers in front of various landmarks and store fronts in mostly Latino neighborhoods. It’s the standard hip-hop video, but the union of the three rappers and the bilingual rhyming (Cambio’s the only one singing in English) gives the track a harder edge while proving a point that still needs to be proven over and over again: that the struggle for dignity and recognition knows no language.
The most striking part of the video is actually the ending, where the children that have been parading in front of the camera get a name and a voice: they are the B.I.M. (the Black Indian Movement of Los Angeles), and they’ll make you want to be as cool as they are when you grow up.
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