Welcome to Forward / Scratch! We are an online music journal of cultural resistance. We focus on the role of music and nightlife as tools of resistance in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
We also feature broader analysis of the ways in which colonialism employs culture to impose violence and confine our political imagination— and how these attitudes manifest at all levels to reinforce the violent institutions we seek to destroy.
This project was founded with the support of DJs Against Apartheid. We direct all proceeds from subscriptions towards mutual aid efforts supporting victims of colonial violence.
Why cultural resistance?
The gulf between the reality of marginalized people and the narrative supported by cultural institutions is widening each moment.
Western cultural institutions are powerful forces for normalizing imperialism. These entities restrict the voices of marginalized people in ways that sanitize their experience and neutralize their struggle. This project is a continuation of the appropriation, white-washing, and profiteering off of Black culture— and of the erasure of ongoing resistance to that theft.
The gulf between the reality of marginalized people and the narrative supported by cultural institutions is widening each moment. We’ve seen this schism on clear display since the October 7 resistance exposed the inhumanity at the core of Western culture. The still-ongoing campaign to silence– and literally erase– Palestinians is a massively coordinated effort by these institutions to justify a genocide that Israel has escalated each day with the direct aid of the United States.It is our duty as cultural producers and consumers to collectively resist the weaponization of our culture to bolster Western global hegemony. We must commit to using our work to affirm all forms of resistance against colonial occupation; leverage our platforms to expand the boundary that Zionists cannot cross; and demand that our work and the spaces that profit from it be used as tools to serve our communities and facilitate the movement for a free Palestine.
Why nightlife?
Dance music has served as a powerful demonstration of collective healing and imagination.
While Forward / Scratch is a platform that features resistance music movements in all forms, our perspective emerged in nightlife organizing.
Dance music communities around the world act as safe havens from the various forms of oppression present in our daily lives. These communities provide space for vulnerability, self-discovery, and processing trauma. This aspect of dance music has existed from its inception, serving as a powerful demonstration of collective healing and imagination.
Many nightlife institutions have undeniably supplied a refuge for subjects of systemic violence. They've facilitated deep communities and networks of care. But their silent refusal to call for solidarity with Palestinians who are being murdered en masse by the Zionist regime exposes that they ultimately seek only to profit from our experiences and consolidate their cultural capital.
This genocide has revealed the true limits of the shelter any institution that capitalizes on cultural production is willing to extend. From our vantage point as nightlife community members, we've witnessed firsthand the stubbornness, the speechlessness, and in some cases the downright hostility that cultural institutions– no matter how often they've gestured at sanctuary for the dispossessed– are willing to display when faced with demands to denounce Zionism.
How do we move forward?
Our project of resistance music preserves the nature of our struggle.
With institutions proving themselves hollow and even actively dangerous to us, only we can facilitate true spaces of nourishment, resistance, and shelter for all oppressed people. We must not only challenge these institutions, but examine the ways in which we have allowed their domination of our spaces, making ourselves complicit in their hegemony and weakening the self-organized, independent ways of gathering that created our communities in the first place.
In breaking our reliance on institutions, we are committing to creating new cultural centers, unmoored from Western ideologies that dispose of revolutionary substance. Our project of resistance music preserves the nature of our struggle, continuing the longstanding tradition of shaping our fight for liberation through the medium of sound.
This is Forward / Scratch.
We are an entirely volunteer run organization. If you have the means, please consider subscribing as a method to provide material support for subjects of colonial violence.
Interested in contributing to Forward / Scratch? You can read our guidelines and submit work here.