Burlington’s Swale have dropped a new video in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. A thoroughly researched photo montage, created by Swale guitarist Eric Olsen, shows every black woman and man killed by police between January 1, 2015, and August 1 of this year. The faces come and go at a terrifying pace, underscoring how the victims’ lives were tragically cut short. The video features a newly recorded cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds,” tracked in recent sessions for the band’s next album. 

As the blog Cover Me Songs reports, Olsen was inspired to create the video after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “I hadn’t seen any sort of aggregator of fatalities at the hands of police, so I started researching that,” Olsen explains. “Collecting the data on all these people took some time, and by the time I was done, more people had been killed. So I added more.”

The original song comes from O’Connor’s 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, where it was a reflection on the killing of young black man Colin Roach. In 1983, Roach was killed inside a London police station, sparking a fury of protest and investigation.

Though the song was not written in connection with Black Lives Matter, it highlights the obvious and appalling trend of police brutality toward black people across cultures and time periods. The new video stands vigil and forces us to confront the insidiousness of racism and hatred, one face at a time.

Swale – "Black Boys on Mopeds" (Sinéad O'Connor cover) from Swale on Vimeo.

Swale’s cover of “Black Boys on Mopeds” is available for download on their Soundcloud page.

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Jordan Adams joined Seven Days as music editor in 2016. In 2021, he became an arts and culture staff writer. He's won awards from the Vermont Press Association and the New England Newspaper and Press Association. In 2022, he became a freelance contributor.

3 replies on “Swale Release Powerful New Video, a Cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’”

  1. Thank you to Swale for this acknowledgment of the tremendous joy, creativity, intelligence, love, and beauty embodied by each of these people so violently murdered by police. While their loss is most painful to their friends, family and communities, we are *all* the poorer for their lives cut short. As a white person, I call out to white people to stand up and take action against racism and violence: engage with candidates for local and statewide offices and vote; speak up about racism in our workplaces, families, schools and communities; read and educate ourselves; LISTEN to people of color and value their experiences and feelings; talk with our children about the harm racism does to all of us; make fighting against racism a commitment in our daily lives.
    #theyareallourchildren

  2. This is a powerful remembrance and an education to those who need to see these faces and confront the reality of all these lives ended. Thank you for sharing this.

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