René Pérez, vocalist for the Puerto Rican alternative hip-hop band Calle 13, will compose a song live on Twitter with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange today at 5 p.m. EST. The two met yesterday in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which offered him diplomatic asylum after he was accused by two women of sexual assault. The effort will also take into account ideas proposed by Twitter users.
Click here to watch the livestream beginning at 5 p.m. on Thursday, June 13.
Pérez had announced last week that he and his group were looking for his Twitter followers to help him write a song. "I'm going to try to get a special guest to accompany us," he said then. Now, after meeting with Assange in London, where the two reportedly spoke for about four hours, Pérez told El Pais that the project would be "A song which talks about the different ways of manipulating information, which denounces the media networks which distort reality in the press and on the radio, television and online. And which talks about how social networks have returned the power to people and how these can be utilized to chase the truth."
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Assange's Wikileaks is an online organization that since 2006 has procured and published hundreds of thousands of news leaks, especially government secrets, from anonymous sources. Bradley Manning, a soldier in the US Army and the source for a huge array of leaks on the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been detained and is charged by the U.S. with 22 offenses in a trial which began early this month. Assange has not been charged by the United States government, but it is suspected in some quarters -- including the government of Ecuador, which extended him the offer of asylum in its embassy -- that his sexual assault charges are trumped-up.
Pérez, who goes by Residente, is the rapper and lead vocalist of a group headed by him and his stepbrother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez ("Visitante"). They have long prided themselves on a kind of musical slipperiness -- Martínez started off with beats that drew from hip-hop and reggaeton's synthetic grit but on recent albums he orchestrates backdrops so mobile and wide-ranging in influence that they can no longer be called "reggaetoneros," as they once were -- which matches Pérez's politics, which correspond largely to those of the hip, Latino left.
"We support Assange because he's a victim of media manipulation. He's being blamed for having made public information which we all should have had access, because we deserve to be informed," Pérez told El Pais. "He unmasked a lot of people and they blame him for that, when it's not Assange who's killing people. He simply revealed what governments are doing. Whoever doesn't support him puts at risk their own human rights, fundamental rights."
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