About 'Not Too Busy To Hate'
Updated: Aug 30, 2020
'Not Too Busy To Hate' is a slogan attributed to the Black Panther party in the book 'Set The Night On Fire' by Jon Wiener and Mike Davis. Find out a little more about the motivation for the album of the same name. PAUL WHEATCROFT
The idea of doing a record based on the experiences of black folks in the US in the 60's doesn't sound like it's gonna set the internet on fire. Yet as I learned more and more about the tremendous institutional and cultural bias against 'coloreds' astray used to call them, the more I started to think that this was a subject worth writing songs about. So when I bumped into Hakim on a forum dedicated to civil rights, I found someone who was thinking the same way. We were both creative people, so why not find a way of getting our message across? This is how the concept for the album was born.
But what we hadn't anticipated was the huge upsurge in attention the subject recieved after George Floyd's murder. We had actually been working for a number of months on song ideas, but this event seemed to give us a real purpose, and you could say we have been soundtracking that event and all the tragic other ones since.
So we want to use this blog as a way of getting across some of our views on what's currently happening in the world. It will have musical content too - we hope you will enjoy reading about the process of recording and writing music. But if you are truly a person with a conscience, you will understand that not is the obligation of artists not simply to provide escapism but to offer an interpretation of what we see going on.
Peace. Paul.