The President Lincoln unveils video for "This Could Be Our Country" [IAI PREMIÈRE]

The President Lincoln’s vocalist and songwriter Alex Maws describes “This Could Be Our Country” as his attempt to record a national anthem for the stateless – complete with horn fanfares and soaring strings. Indeed, stories about migration, displacement and globalisation persist throughout the music of The President Lincoln, a band which itself is named after the early 20th Century ocean liner which brought Maws’ Polish-Jewish ancestors from the old world to the new.


This theme extends to the band’s first video from its début album “The Sinking of The President Lincoln” (Nine Mile Records), in which “This Could Be Our Country” is set to a montage of crowdsourced home-movie footage from family vacations in the 1960s and 70s. Watching these shaky amateur films today, in an age when every smartphone enables us to document our lives add nausea, is both charming and thought-provoking. What did world travellers of a previous generation choose to record? What sites, events and people were considered to be meaningful enough to commit to a film reel?

 Assembled together, these images project the mundane side of globalisation and the deflating of some of the world’s most “important” symbols of national identity.

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