Miss Leading shares new video, "Woke"
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Loading... - Aria Anderson
- 31 May 2022
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Internationally lauded poet and alt pop-artist Miss Leading shares new video, "Woke" - a commentary on social and corporate lip service to racism and discrimination.
In "Woke" Miss Leading calls out the hypocrisy of the establishment in reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, with some people and companies superficially displaying concern for the cause after years of having race issues ignored or explained away as not existent. Corporations placed People of Colour front and centre of marketing and publicity campaigns; claims that black and brown voices were important; that change was on the horizon. Swept under the surface however were decades of discriminatory claims and action that had previously been ignored.
The lyrics in "Woke" are a response to this virtue signalling that happened in the throes of the Black Lives Matter movement:
"So you woke now, been asleep for years,
you see em choke now, deluge of white tears
like it just broke.
Same system always there, fire was stoked.
Long before you cared."
"Woke" is unnerving: voyeurs of a psychological shedding, we witness a deep cleansing of years of prejudice and racism. We watch the transformation of a woman with long, satiny dark hair in a sheer black dress, standing alone in a stark white world, as she confronts a life of gaslighting objectivity, employing blunt rusty scissors as the instrument to cut away the hypocrisy.
Miss Leading says, "The symbol of haircutting is that of 'a thousand tiny cuts' - that accumulation of constant prejudice and its collective impact, the pieces of hair on the floor a visual representation of the pieces of yourself that you lose when accommodating everyday discrimination."
"Woke" appears on Miss Leading's 2021 album, Minor Thing. French online mag Sun Burns Out reviewed it as a "masterful ode to difference, which evokes racial and sexual violence and the recent awaking of consciousness in this regard." Read More...
