"Please Don't," the first of six videos from the David Byrne / Fatboy Slim album Here Lies Love, is now on view at nonesuch.com/media. The track features vocals by Santigold, one of the many artists to contribute vocals to the album, which explores the life of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos and her rise to power. "Please Don't" documents Marcos's use of "handbag diplomacy" with world leaders to promote Philippine interests abroad.
As we reported earlier this week in the Nonesuch Journal, "Please Don't," the first of six videos from the David Byrne / Fatboy Slim album Here Lies Love, debuted on BoingBoing on Monday. You can now watch the "Please Don't" video at nonesuch.com/media. The track features vocals by Santigold—one of many artists, including Natalie Merchant, Kate Pierson, Tori Amos, and Steve Earle—to contribute vocals to the album, which is due out April 6 and is available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.
Here Lies Love explores the life of former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos and her childhood servant, Estrella Cumpas, with each of the 22 songs on the album's two CDs representing a different aspect of the complicated tale of Marcos's rise to power. The deluxe version also includes a 100-page book about the project and a DVD containing the "Please Don't'" video plus an additional five from the tracks sung by Cindi Lauper, Allison Moorer, Róisín Murphy, Sharon Jones, and Merchant.
About "Please Don't," Byrne writes: "We did a photo session for a magazine the other day," and I told the interviewer that on this song, by the time you get to the chorus, she owns it—she’s turned it into a Santigold song. Perfect."
He goes on to describe this and the other videos on the DVD:
Most, like this one, use news and archival footage to, well, show that every word of the song is true! Most of the lyrics on this one are lifted gently from interviews and quotations—the “please don’t” chorus especially. At some point as first lady, Imelda began to feel that she could help Philippine interests by charming world leaders into seeing things her way. “Handbag diplomacy” she called it—as she liked to imply that to solve a problem, she could bypass President Marcos and just grab a handbag and hop on a plane with some of her assistants. It sometimes worked! There was, for example, an Islamic-backed insurgency rising in the south of the Philippine archipelago, and she thought that a leader in that part of the world, Qaddafi in this case, might help pull the plug on that support if he saw things her way. Apparently he did—the funding stopped and the insurrection lost momentum, and she later described him as a pushover, a mama’s boy.
You can watch the "Please Don't" video now at nonesuch.com/media.
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