composers

"To be where I am, there came about a combination of many things that include hard work, perseverance and adherence to certain life and music business principles"

"I had a burning passion for music as early as I can remember and I was happy to discover that I was gifted in this area, so I never dreamed of doing anything other than earning a living through music"

"We must always aim for the top and I see my role as helping recognise our wealth of talent and helping make sure the various DStv channels that feature music have of flow of good Zimbabwean content. This gives me great satisfaction"

"With the current economic climate, the downs are many"

"It’s basically a book of answers. I asked my fans on Facebook to post questions concerning the Zimbabwean music industry, so I responded. But it mainly touches on the struggles that we face as Zimbabwean musicians. We are famous but poor"

"I am 47 years right now, the journey had its fair share of ups and downs"

"Dancehall has provided employment to a lot of young people who are now entertainers, producers and dancers, so it's a good thing in that regard"

"I noticed online that there is not even a single thing such as this on Zim guitar so I decided to be the one to start it"

"Musicians, fans and arts journalists will benefit a lot because it addresses the day-to-day issues of the music industry"

"They are running in their own lane so they won’t disturb anybody"

"“It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of Al requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction"

"It’s that the NIST databases foreshadow the emergence of a logic that has now thoroughly pervaded the tech sector: the unswerving belief that everything is data and is there for the taking. It doesn’t matter where a photograph was taken or whether it reflects a moment of vulnerability or pain or if it represents a form of shaming the subject. It has become so normalized across the industry to take and use whatever is available that few stop to question the underlying politics.”"

"“To suggest that we democratize Al to reduce asymmetries of power is a little like arguing for democratizing weapons manufacturing in the service of peace. As Audre Lorde reminds us, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”"

"What epistemological violence is necessary to make the world readable to a machine learning system? AI seeks to systematize the unsystematizable, formalize the social, and convert an infinitely complex and changing universe into a Linnaean order of machine-readable tables. Many of AI’s achievements have depended on boiling things down to a terse set of formalisms based on proxies: identifying and naming some features while ignoring or obscuring countless others. To adapt a phrase from philosopher Babette Babich, machine learning exploits what it does know to predict what it does not know: a game of repeated approximations. Datasets are also proxies—stand-ins for what they claim to measure. Put simply, this is transmuting difference into computable sameness.”"

"Ultimately, 'data' has become a bloodless word; it disguises both its material origins and its ends. And if data is seen as abstract and immaterial, then it more easily falls outside of traditional understandings and responsibilities of care, consent, or risk."

"From the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth's geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, building devices like the Amazon Echo and iPhone that are often designed to last for only a few years."

"Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that Al systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences?”."

"In one case, Amazon negotiated a memorandum of understanding with a police department in Florida, discovered through a public records request filed by journalist Caroline Haskins, which showed that police were incentivized to promote the Neighbors app and for every qualifying download they would receive credits toward free Ring cameras. The result was a “self-perpetuating surveillance network: more people download Neighbors, more people get Ring, surveillance footage proliferates, and police can request whatever they want,” Haskins writes. Surveillance capacities that were once ruled over by courts are now on offer in Apple’s App Store and promoted by local street cops. As media scholar Tung-Hui Hu observes, by using such apps, we “become freelancers for the state’s security apparatus."

"Controlling time — whether via the clocks for churches, trains or data centers — has always been a function of controlling the political order.”"

"Sometimes, people think you read their minds, but it’s just that they’re so predictable."

"It wasn’t what I’d seen and heard and tasted that night that made me mad. It was the fact that I’d seen something unspeakably evil, and yet I wasn’t as totally horrified as I should have been."

"I didn’t really think she was making that much sense. Or if she was, it was all ringing too true for me to want to hear it."

""I don’t want to die while I'm still alive."

""If I can't be involved in singing, I feel like a dead person"

"From the first meeting I had with Bedri Spahiu until the end, I gave this information to Cvetozar Vučič, an official of the Yugoslav Legation, giving him the claim, the proceedings of the trial of Koçi Xoxes, which I got from the collection of the newspaper "Zeri i Populli". I also gave Cveto, the first conversation with Bedri Spahiu, as well as his opinions until the end."

"Among other things, Bedriu told me, to tell Tuku, not to sell the spoils at once, because according to his opinion, this situation would continue for a long time and that Bedriu told me that they were in a tight economic situation , but they did not sell the spoils. He continued and told me that; they say about me that I had 400,000 lek, they say this to discredit us, that we allegedly took measures for this situation. When we parted, we held each other's necks and shook my hand and he told me that; You are the first communist to whom I expressed my thoughts."

"We talked a little with Nado on the train and she told me that; Bedriu thinks that our problems are not being solved, and that in his opinion, as far as he listened to the radio, he said that even in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not all things were in order. Then they met with Nado in September 1956, where the District Committee of Tirana was, I had then come from Berat and she came from Elbasan, and we met near the former Executive Committee of the Tirana district. She told me; u Dhora, they will say that we have made an appointment. We both agreed to meet in the flower garden before "Dajti", but I didn't go."

"But he advised me to leave for Gjirokastër, because it is a good people. Bedriu told me that he had been looking for Tuku all morning, that he had heard that he had come. I told him that Tuku had come to Tirana for dinner with his mother and had left in the morning, that I had not met him either. Bedri then told me that; how he ran away at once and expressed regret that he did not meet. Since this day, I have not met Bedri, while I met Nedo in July on the train, by chance when I was traveling from Tirana to the beach of Durrës."

"Party today is a matter of honor. During this conversation, we walked ten to fifteen steps together, and without talking about anything else, we parted."

"In June 1956, I met Bedri and her wife in the flower garden near the "Dajti" hotel. Bedriu told me that he knew that I had moved to Gjirokastër, but that I told him that I will not go to Gjirokastër, and for that, I would sell a piano forte and live in Tirana. Bedriu told me that; what I thought was impossible, because they won't buy the piano and they won't let you compose songs."

"We as artists are responsible if something wrong is taking place in our society. It’s very important for us to speak up, even though we may have to do it with a double tongue. We have to speak out for our people."

"Im the last martyr of this tribe The tribe that has no bread, no water The tribe that a lot of its matyrs dont have any grave"

"Take your head out from under the yoke of slavery And sing the hymn of life Break the longing you have Tell with the whole world Let go, let go, Don't miss your dreams"

"Take off your scarf, the sun is going to set Take off your scarf, will make the air all right Take off your scarf, make the hair re… re… released"

"Sing until the city becomes a women's song Until this homeland, becomes a home land."

"Some time ago one of my daughters persuaded me to do an online Pink Floyd quiz. I scored 56%."

"I knew I couldn't play 'Comfortably Numb' better than David or Roger, or indeed even the Australian Pink Floyd [tribute band]""

"You can’t say Shakespeare has nothing to offer because he’s a white man."

"You don’t want to be a freedom fighter every time you enter a job."

"You know, always being positive, always wanting to try things, even if at first glance, it isn’t quite clear what the outcome is going to be."

"Ultimately it’s a case of sink or swim, ‘I’ve always had that “sink-or-swim” thing about my own career too,At difficult moments, it’s like: “Okay, you’re not gonna sink so let’s figure something out.” Take a moment, have a whinge... and then get on with it.’"

"You can’t get a complete history of anything in two hours – particularly the slave trade."

"I think that’s something that you have to keep learning and recalibrating and experiencing through life."

"Those excluding people of colour are robbing themselves – they just don’t realise it."

"Whatever choices you make in life, it’s OK – there’s more life, you know?"

"I think there can be this perception that, people who have some kind of practice, whether it's meditation or spiritual practice or whatever, have got it all figured out, and there's a kind of righteousness about it."

"Making a film with a 99% Black female cast is great, but if we are not allowed to explore what our hairstyles will look like or if we're not allowed to imbue the film and our characters in the story with details that are specific to our experience, then it doesn't mean anything."

"Progress doesn’t go in a straight line. Representation moves forward, then retreats. It’s a journey. I don’t know what the final destination looks like, or if there even is one. It’s just about pushing forward."

"I really love the idea of a space to self-learn and create an internal independence system of self-discipline outside of school bells and uniforms and stuff. I’m really into the idea of education being part of life."

"I always go back to the heart. A lot of it is about the small decisions of the heart that lead to the big issues."