Shahid Buttar

Consider this my ode to the Resistance.

I spun this set during sunset on a Saturday in Oakland for a housewarming and joint birthday party celebrating a pair of brilliant activist lawyers and a new intentional community. It includes the most hip hop I’ve ever included in a set, with some of my favorite and most conscious tracks leading into some swing, melodic, and goofy house before tribal and melodic interludes leading up to a dreamy and finally disquieting close.

Make sure you catch the lyrical mashup around 56:00!

In a story covering the emergence of rising activism among workers in the tech industry, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune quoted me (and gave me the pull quote!) saying "Comfortable people are waking up. It’s easy to be aware when you’re uncomfortable; a lot of people have lost their comfort and their complacency."

Whenever I
feel
melancholy
I remember

how other people
spend the month of December:
exposed to the elements,
trying to stay dry.

A hair's breadth
separates
that guy
from you & I.

Buzzfeed included my comments in a story about a protest at Palantir in Palo Alto, California, a historically unlikely site for protest (which I happen to know well, having organized resistance to the invasion of Iraq there duing my time in law school 15 years ago).

I rode the water
when the Way seemed
clear until suddenly
it no longer appeared
like a bend in a river
after which the water
was somehow all gone
as if the Universe
watched the horrors
we inflict on ourselves
and walked away ashamed

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting included an interview we did this fall in its Best of CounterSpin 2016 compilation (starting at 16:10) addressing how the press in America has withered, both from within, and under a government assault disturbingly sustained by a federal court in a series of cases that I wrote about earlier this year.

CounterSpin's Best of 2016 also has important other interviews addressing various dimensions of our constitutional crisis, including police violence, the Flint water crisis (and an overlooked assault on local self-determination that made it possible), corporate complicity in climate change, white supremacy, and the rise of President P****-Grabber.

I spun this downtempo, funky, melodic set for Gender Blender’s 2016 holiday party at the renowned Mission Control space in its new location in West Oakland. Mission Control has been a cornerstone in the Bay Area counterculture for more than a generation, and Gender Blender has been supporting, connecting, and inspiring queer people & allies since 2009. 

After an emotionally challenging summer, I enjoyed the chance to immerse myself in my work in the fall. October offered many chances to speak in support of other organizations in addition to EFF, including Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach (APILO), the ACLU of Northern California, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle in Baltimore, and a documentary film, "Do Not Resist," that played at an independent theater in my old neighborhood.

News that Yahoo facilitated the NSA's war on America made the surveillance debate more complicated, but I tried to make it simple on Rising Up with Sonali Kolhatkar by explaining that, "What we're talking about here are general warrants."

[I wrote this poem a few weeks before my mother passed away.]