Amanda Palmer
photo by Hayley Rosenblum

Amanda Palmer shares "Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now" song & video

Amanda Palmer teamed with singer/songwriter Jasmine Power, director/choreographer Noémie Lafrance (who did Feist’s “1234” and “My Moon, My Man” videos), sixty women, and a few men for the powerful new song and video, “Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now.” Amanda writes:

last night in los angeles (where i just finished tracking my new record on wednesday, can i get an AMEN), i held a free screening for this video. a few hundred people came to a cinema to watch the clip and ask questions, and i passed the mic around. many women – and it is really important to add, also men – shared painfully personal stories of their own experience with rape, assault, surviving, and their anger at what is happening in our country right now.

i hugged a lot of people. there were tears. if you were there, thank you for coming and holding the space. it was a much-needed collective howl.

and now:

it’s time. i’ve been working on this video project for months and it is with a strangely heavy heart that i admit: the timing is uncanny.

we set the release date for today – october 5th – because it was the one year anniversary of the new york times exposé on harvey weinstein.

as i sit here typing this, we await the decision of the senate to confirm brett kavanaugh, and the news isn’t looking particularly promising. in fact, it’s looking pretty appalling. i am holding my breath.

and i feel like i’ve been holding my breath for 42 years.

so many women i know right now feel a kind of shapeless, exhausting and indescribable rage. rage at not feeling seen. rage at not being believed. rage at being thrown under the train when a man’s job or reputation is at stake.

our reproductive rights – and therefore, our human rights – are in grave danger of being slashed and burned. and the frenzy around politics and the supreme court decision points to something much darker, much deeper and much more broken about our society.

many of the women i know and work with don’t know what to do with this rage. how to harness it, what to do with it. it’s exhausting, it’s overwhelming. what can women do to effectively combat what feels like a full-on assault of our human-hood?

i don’t know. all we can do is try to answer that question.

so one weekend this past july in brooklyn, in a run-down old church rectory, sixty women (and a few men) got together to try.

Later on, she added:

how do you sing about rape?

how do you make a video about rape, without getting it all wrong?

especially when the rapes and assaults being discussed as topics-du-jour in the media are simultaneously empowering women but also forcing us to relive and hash over the worst moments in our lives – our worst traumas – in front of people we don’t know?

it has come to this. in order to effect change, we are having to expose our darkest pain in public forums. on the internet. in newspapers. in the streets. in the senate, in front of hundreds of millions of people watching.

it seems infinitely complicated to address these issues when they’re already so over-saturated and raw. how to not make things worse? how can we express ourselves and our righteous anger in our own terms, on our own dime, in our own time?

that’s what i wanted to do with this video.

take it back.

Jasmine also added:

As we directed the chorus members through our song chorus, I felt this overwhelming emotion come over me as I gazed into the eyes of each and every woman singing along. There were moments while watching the monitors where I felt shudders of pain and sparks of excitement run through my entire body. The day felt powerful, dark, fearless and then light when I would respond to a grateful smile of another woman on set, as she would say ‘thank you for writing this’. I hope my children will watch this video one day and be relieved that times have changed.

And Noémie added:

How does one talk about rape, or even harder, illustrate it in a music video? It is too painful of a subject, and in many ways a taboo subject. What inspired me about the song is that it dared talking about rape in all of its different shades of grey. There is a line in the song that particularly moved me, ‘…let’s get this over with’, because it explores the fine lines of coercion. I felt that in the context of the Weinstein story it encapsulated the real sadness in this for all parties. I wanted the video to reflect that and be about the sadness, rather than the atrocity.”

You can read much more from Amanda Palmer, see pictures from the shoot, quotes from cast members, and much more here. You can purchase a download of the new song (name your price) and read the lyrics in full at Bandcamp. Watch the video below. To quote Amanda Palmer, it is “not safe for work in the slightest.”