"Rise Up" is a
pop song
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom.S. Frith, W. Straw, and J. Street, eds, '' The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock'' (Cambridge: Cambridg ...
recorded by the
Canadian
Canadians () are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''C ...
group
the Parachute Club
The Parachute Club was a Canadian band formed in Toronto in 1982. They released three top 40 hits in Canada between 1983 and 1987, including "Rise Up", "At the Feet of the Moon" and "Love Is Fire" (which featured guest duet vocals from John O ...
on their self-titled 1983 album. It was produced and engineered by
Daniel Lanois
Daniel Roland Lanois ( , ; born September 19, 1951) is a Canadian record producer and musician.
He has produced albums by artists including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, and Harold Budd ...
, and written by Parachute Club members
Billy Bryans,
Lauri Conger,
Lorraine Segato
Lorraine P. Segato (born June 17, 1956, in Hamilton, Ontario) is a Canadian pop singer-songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist for and a principal songwriter of new wave and pop rock group The Parachute Club, with which she continues to ...
and
Steve Webster, with additional lyrics contributed by filmmaker
Lynne Fernie
Lynne Fernie (born 1946) is a Canadian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. She spent fourteen years as the Canadian Spectrum programmer for the Hot Docs Festival from 2002 to 2016, and was described as having a passion as "deep as her knowled ...
.
An upbeat call for
peace
Peace is a state of harmony in the absence of hostility and violence, and everything that discusses achieving human welfare through justice and peaceful conditions. In a societal sense, peace is commonly used to mean a lack of conflict (suc ...
, celebration, and "freedom / to love who we please," the song was a national hit in Canada, and was hailed as a unique achievement in Canadian pop music:
According to Segato, the song was not written with any one individual group in mind, but as a universal anthem of freedom and equality;
["The Parachute Club releases remix version of ‘Rise Up’"]
''Toronto Star
The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part of Torstar's Daily News Brands (Torstar), Daily News Brands division.
...
'', June 23, 2014. Fernie described the song's lyrics as having been inspired in part by West Coast
First Nations
First nations are indigenous settlers or bands.
First Nations, first nations, or first peoples may also refer to:
Indigenous groups
*List of Indigenous peoples
*First Nations in Canada, Indigenous peoples of Canada who are neither Inuit nor Mé ...
rituals in which young girls would "rise up" at dawn to adopt their adult names as a
rite of passage
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of social status, status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisa ...
.
It remains the band's most famous song, and has been adopted as an activist anthem for causes as diverse as
gay rights
Rights affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people vary greatly by country or jurisdiction—encompassing everything from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage to the death penalty for homosexuality.
Not ...
,
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
,
anti-racism
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate ...
and the
New Democratic Party
The New Democratic Party (NDP; , ) is a federal political party in Canada. Widely described as social democratic,The party is widely described as social democratic:
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* The Editors of ''Encyclopædia Britann ...
.
["An Anthem to Remember". ]CBC News Network
CBC News Network (formerly CBC Newsworld) is a Canadian English-language specialty news channel owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). It is Canada's first all-news channel, and the world's third-oldest television service of this ...
, August 27, 2011. As well, the song's
reggae
Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its Jamaican diaspora, diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first ...
and
soca-influenced rhythms made it the first significant commercial breakthrough for