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The Documentary Podcast

Greenland: Why music matters

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.32.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kate Molleson visits the world’s largest island to explore the role of traditional and new music for its communities today. Between the capital of Nuuk and smaller fishing town of Maniitsoq, Kate encounters drum dancers resurrecting a traditional Inuit practice which almost died out on Greenland’s west coast, discovers the political and sonic influence of the Greenlandic language on music from hymn singing to hip-hop, meets artists using their lyrics to engage with issues from the climate to the country’s deep-rooted social problems, and visits a music school offering a safe space to young people.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The biggest island in the world is an uninhabitable ice sheet.

0:13.7

A few isolated settlements cling to the rocky coast,

0:17.6

but really this frozen north is the realm of Wales and polar bears and walruses. Traditional Inuit life here

0:25.2

still involves hunting and fishing through the unimaginably cold winters.

0:30.1

This past year Greenland has shifted into the frame. The president tried to buy it.

0:37.0

The melting ice sheet spells global catastrophe.

0:40.0

International shipping routes are opening up where the sea ice is disappearing.

0:45.0

Everyone wants a piece of Greenland.

0:48.0

I've come here to find out what that means for people here and how they're using music to deal with the seismic

0:55.4

changes that are on their shores. I respect my culture and I am proud to be a Greenlander and a nook but also I am not trying to be in a box where I have to be like this if I should rap or be a musician.

1:17.0

In general, in Greenland, we are very spiritual. I mean, when I was a child, I was afraid of the Northern Lights

1:20.0

because there were spirits of the ancestors, and you whistled they would cap your head off and play soccer with it.

1:26.5

Did you ever try whistling? No.

1:28.7

No. Not to this day. Yeah today I'm not so afraid of it, but there. I think the music is kind of a glue between people.

1:37.0

And they use it in every occasion.

1:40.0

It's very, very powerful.

1:42.0

It's not you who I miss.

1:44.0

Everybody knows about being drunk and domestic violence.

1:49.0

There are so many suicides every year.

1:51.0

It's hard but it needs to be talked about. So if we'd

1:55.2

planned on making a program about Greenland and the climate crisis, we realized pretty

2:00.4

quickly that for most artists the pressing issues aren't so much what's

...

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