Word: musicalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gray and rainy Saturday, five young men are gathered at the Body Guard music studio in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. The modest one-story building has only two rooms and no sign out front. Inside, the walls are lined with a velveteen fabric, the floor is covered in shag carpeting and there's minimal sound equipment - just a dated computer, two keyboards, a microphone and a mixing desk. The men are recording a track called "One Love," as King Fisher, the studio's founder and father figure to all the musicians who pass through it, sits at the computer...
...Thankfully, there are people like Body Guard Studio's King Fisher, whose real name is Emrys Savage, working toward peace - and doing it with music. "When you go to a club and the music says, 'Go down, go down,' people go down," says Aruna Hakim Dumbuya, a.k.a. Wahid, one of the musicians at Body Guard on the rainy Saturday. "And when the music says, 'Come up,' they come up. If you say 'Make peace,' people will make peace...
...handful of artists are utilizing music's important social role to sing about postwar reconciliation. Songs of peace regularly drift out of Body Guard Studio and are sometimes heard on the radio. Musicians often also spread their message to the countryside through a United Nations development program called Peace Tours, which takes groups of artists and singers to rural areas to talk about peacemaking...
...also wants more. He wants to see Sierra Leone move toward peace and development. Fisher believes the path to reconciliation is for young men like Shine to lay down their weapons and pick up microphones. "Even [during the war] the rebels put down their guns when the music came on," he says. "The military and the rebels danced together, and when they're dancing, they don't have to fight...
...After the group at Body Guard is done mixing "One Love," Fisher plays some old hits over the sound system. When the popular song "Arrata and Squirrel," which compares politicians to vermin, starts pumping out of the speakers, the power goes out. The music stops and everything is dark. But Shine and the others keep singing...