Until 2020, I knew nothing at all about the band Tor Band from Rogachev, Belarus. The guys had found their niche and started releasing protest songs back in 2017, but they were still known to very few. In 2020, though, they became almost the anthem of the protests alongside many others. Their “We’re Not a ‘Little Nation’!” quickly gained popularity among protesters. After that, they began releasing similar songs one after another. You can’t say all of them are of the highest level of performance or use non-trivial musical approaches. But could you say that about Vysotsky, for example? And yet Tor Band’s work spoke to the soul.
But our “most humane state in the world” got to them as well. All the musicians—and even their wives—were arrested; the band itself was declared an extremist formation. I can’t even imagine what’s being done to them now in the regime’s jails. And the sentences they face are anything but humane.
I don’t consider the expression of an honest opinion to be extremism. They’re merely saying what those in power don’t want to hear. And that’s why I think it must be repeated and repeated until, someday, it’s heard. If only because, for now, I can still do it.
There’s no official music video for the song “Go Away,” but there is an unofficial one—that’s the one I’ll share.
