Now available worldwide, “Chey Calvo” the politically charged new single and music video by Indie/Alternative Rockers American High. Download your copy today watch the amazing new music video!American High are a punk and 60’s influenced indie/alternative rock group from Sacramento, California. They play ‘catchy tunes with dark themes’. “Cheye Calvo” is their new single following their successful debut full-length “Bones In The Attic, Flowers In The Basement.”
Their sound and lyrics have an optimistic perspective on the personal, the social and the political.
Here is the story behind the new single:
In July of 2008 in Maryland, USA, a man named Cheye Calvo returned to his suburban home after having walked one of his dogs. Inside he found a scene of absolute horror. Over a dozen highly armed and violent intruders had broken into his house. His mother was bound and lying face down on the kitchen floor in tears. Then Mr Calvo heard the terrifying screams of his wife. She too had been bound and forced face down on the floor. Then the Calvo family watched in horror as their two beloved dogs were shot and killed. One was shot in the back as he ran away. The intruders spent the next four hours systematically destroying the home. They destroyed furniture, broke cabinets and tracked the blood of his pets throughout the entire house. When the ordeal was over the assailants simply left. They didn’t even have the common decency to apologize.
The violent intruders were not street gang members. They were not foreign military invaders. They were not ‘illegal aliens’. The intruders were police officers.
County police conducted a ‘no knock’ warrant on Mr Calvo’s home that day after a package of marijuana was randomly mailed to his address by drug smugglers. The smugglers picked the homes of unsuspecting citizens and delivered drugs to their front porches, apparently to be picked up later before anyone noticed. This time police noticed and busted into Mr Calvo’s home looking for evidence. They found none. That was because Mr Calvo was not involved in drugs or the drug trade at all. Cheye Calvo was the mayor of the town.
A ‘no knock’ search warrant is one in which police are given the insane authority to break into and enter any American home they see fit (except in Oregon and Florida). They are not required to announce themselves first and almost universally enter homes armed and ready for a gun fight. Often clothed in all black with no identifiable law enforcement markings, people have no way of knowing the identity of the people breaking in. Could they be robbers? Rapists? Murderers? Paedophiles coming for your children? Honestly, if you were woken up in the middle of the night by an explosion, loud shouting and gunfire would your first thought be it’s the police? Most of these raids are conducted in the dark, predawn hours and it is common for police to first use flashbang grenades. Flashbangs cause temporary blindness and disorientation. They also critically injure babies if tossed into the baby’s crib (Habersham County, Georgia 5/14). Many pets have been killed in front of their owners during these sickeningly common raids. Worst of all, men, women, children, even the elderly have been murdered by police during botched ‘no knock’ raids. Even police officers themselves have been killed during these high risk and immoral home invasions. Over 100 ‘no knock’ warrants are executed each day in the US.
With their new single ‘Cheye Calvo’ American High presents this question: which is worse? Fellow citizens using drugs or police breaking into their homes and killing them in the dead of night? A better question is this: do drug prohibition laws even work at all? Americans in 1933 didn’t think so. That year alcohol prohibition was ended because it lead to crippling police corruption, the mass murder of innocents, the filling of our prisons with nonviolent alcohol offenders and most importantly, it didn’t stop anyone from drinking. Prohibition laws do not work. They didn’t work then, and they do not work now.
If ‘no knock’ police invasions are necessary in the war on drugs we say end the war on drugs. We think most people would agree that burning babies and murdering innocent people is much worse than letting people use drugs. And those are our choices. There isn’t a third.
‘No knock’ warrants are unnecessary and they erode trust between government and the people.They lead to terror, PTSD, injury and death and we believe they are a clear violation of the peoples’ rights.
The real question is this: exactly who is making money from drug prohibition laws? Just like ‘deep throat’ said to Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate scandal: follow the money!
“Cheye Calvo” is available worldwide and can be download on iTunes in the United States here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/cheye-calvo-single/1357861100
Check out the “Cheye Calvo” music video by American High here:
Follow American High on Twitter @AmericanHigh1
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