“Big brother is watching you,” cautions Rap Against Dictatorship.
The Thai hip hop collective is back with their new single, “Big Brother (พี่ชาย)” named after the leader of the totalitarian state at the center of the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Performed by EP$ON, Numba9, G-Bear, Protozua, Dif Kids, Liberate P, HOCKHACKER, 3Bone, K.AGLET, and P6ICK, the group has provided additional information about the novel that inspired their new track.
Since its publication 72 years ago, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been serving as a cautionary tale for a dystopian society. The Atlantic’s George Packer described that “it’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984.”
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In a statement, the English author said that his work was “not an attack on any particular government,” but a “satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals. The Atlantic quoted him, “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
Rap Against Dictatorship Ask ‘Where Does The Tax Go’ In New Track, ‘งบประมาณ’
The single arrives a month after Rap Against Dictatorship shared on social media that the two-year-old “reupload” version of their 2020 single, “ปฏิรูป (Reform)” has been “blocked from viewing in Thailand,” along with a screenshot of a February 21 email from YouTube that states their video has been blocked “after receiving a legal complaint from a government entity.”
In 2021, the group has filed a petition to oppose the YouTube block order, arguing that “the request to suppress… is unlawful. Because it is a unilateral process, the opposing party, which is the artist who owns the work, has no opportunity to argue.”
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Rap Against Dictatorship To Challenge Thai Government’s Block Order Of ‘Reform’ YouTube Video In Court
Earlier this month, Rap Against Dictatorship uploaded a third version of “Reform” on YouTube—with a ‘video unavailable’ watermark—writing, “The first two versions of music videos were sentenced to suspension in Thailand due to the illegal Act. Computer 2007 Section 20.” All three versions can be viewed outside the country.
Watch “Big Brother” below:
