title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Whitesnake is the seventh studio album by British rock band Whitesnake, released on 23 March 1987 by Geffen Records in the United States, and by EMI Records in the UK one week later. It was co-written and recorded for over a year in what would be the first and final collaboration between vocalist David Coverdale and guitarist John Sykes, as well as the final album to feature longtime bassist Neil Murray. The album, besides its commercial success, is remarkable for the band's change to a more modern glam metal look and sound, and the first recording to use the band's new logo which would characterise them in the future.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Initially the album was released worldwide with different titles, tracklists and by different record labels. In Europe and Australia, it was titled 1987 and included two extra songs absent from the North American version, "Looking for Love" and "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again", while in Japan the album was released as Serpens Albus with the North American tracklist. The 20th and 30th anniversary remastered reissues have a common tracklist, including the additional tracks.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: The album was a critical and commercial success around the world, eventually selling over 8 million copies in the US alone and thus going eight times Platinum by RIAA in February 1995. It peaked at No. 2 on the US "Billboard" 200 for ten nonconsecutive weeks, barred from the top spot by three different albums, including Michael Jackson's "Bad", and was more weeks in the Top 5 than any other album in 1987. "Whitesnake" was the band's highest-charting album in the US and peaked at No. 8 on the UK Albums Chart.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Four songs were released as official singles, "Still of the Night", "Here I Go Again '87", "Is This Love", "Give Me All Your Love ('88 Mix)", and one as a promotional single, "Crying in the Rain '87". Among them, "Here I Go Again" and "Is This Love" are the band's most successful charting hits, topping the "Billboard" Hot 100 at number one and two respectively.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Its success in the US boosted its predecessor, "Slide It In" (1984), from Gold to double Platinum status by RIAA, and would see the band receive a nomination at the 1988 Brit Awards for Best British Group and at the American Music Awards of 1988 for Favorite Pop/Rock Album.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: The supporting tour for "Slide It In" came to an end in January 1985, when Whitesnake played two shows at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil. After the band's performance at the last show, drummer Cozy Powell left the group.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: After almost ten years since David Coverdale had started his solo career and formed Whitesnake, he was actually about to fold the band. However, executives at Geffen Records asked Coverdale to continue working with guitarist John Sykes, as they saw potential in the two. Whitesnake had previously signed with Geffen for distribution in the US and Canada only, while in Europe they remained with EMI.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Coverdale wanted the band's sound "to be leaner, meaner and more electrifying ... felt it was time for a change. I didn’t want to stay in the same old traditional blues and pop scenario". It was kind of "Americanization", but rather following popular trends, "it was a series of synchronised elements that came together". However, Coverdale recalls that "the only downside was it was the only time I’d embraced a fashion presentation, as opposed to being stylized in what I do. I think that disappointed a lot of my hardcore people".


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: In the spring of 1985, Coverdale and Sykes decamped to the town of Le Rayol in the south of France to start writing material for a new album. According to Coverdale, bassist Neil Murray also helped with some of the arrangements. Two songs that would emerge from these sessions would be two of Whitesnake's biggest hits: "Still of the Night", based on an old demo by Coverdale and Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, and "Is This Love", originally written for Tina Turner. The middle atmospherics with cello riff of "Still of the Night" was Coverdale's idea after experimenting with introduction atmospheric sounds from a synthesizer on "Looking for Love".


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Coverdale, Sykes and Murray then moved to Los Angeles, where they rehearsed and started auditioning for drummers, and hired Aynsley Dunbar. With their line-up complete, Whitesnake headed up to Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to lay plans for the new record. One of the first issues the band faced was Sykes' desire to achieve a specific guitar sound that he wanted, which he eventually found with the help of Coverdale's friend and engineer Bob Rock, who had previously worked with Bon Jovi on the multi-platinum album "Slippery When Wet". According to Coverdale, there was a great potential and creativity between him and Sykes.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: The next problem the band faced was a serious sinus infection with which Coverdale was stricken. This put the album's production behind schedule, especially when Coverdale underwent surgery and half a year-long rehabilitation program without a guarantee the voice would come back. While recovering, various invoices started circulating from Toronto and London, with Coverdale saying that "received no support from Sykes at that time" and "he did everything he could to take advantage of me being compromised". Allegedly Sykes grew impatient, claiming that the singer "used every excuse possible to explain why he didn’t want to record his vocals", and reportedly suggested bringing in a new vocalist and carrying on without Coverdale, which eventually led to the end of Coverdale's relationship with both Sykes and producer Mike Stone. Sykes thirty years later denied this: "Now I want to correct a rumour that I know has been out there for a long time. It's been said that when David was having his troubles, I went to Geffen and urged them to bring in another singer to replace him in Whitesnake. That's rubbish. How on earth could you ever have anyone fronting Whitesnake apart from David Coverdale?".


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: After Coverdale recovered, he started work on his vocal tracks with record producer Ron Nevison, before soon switching to Keith Olsen after few days because "it didn't sound good at all ... he [Ron] did great with other people, just not with me". Olsen asked him to sing "Still of the Night" in first studio session, but although he almost vomited, "sang the song twice, fingers crossed – and that's what's on the record". Keyboard players Don Airey and Bill Cuomo were brought in to record some keyboard parts, as well as Dutch guitar player Adrian Vandenberg to record the guitar solo for the re-recorded version of the song "Here I Go Again" because Sykes disliked blues music. Coverdale was also discussing the possibility of Vandenberg soon joining Whitesnake.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: By late 1986, with the recording process done and the album slated to be released in early 1987, Coverdale made the decision to let the other members of the band go, due to personal differences. According to Coverdale, he was facing trust issues with band members, his depression upon arrival to L.A. from a holiday in Munich, where he had seen his daughter from his first marriage, and a massive debt due to not working for two or three years.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: On the band's new logo and cover artwork, Coverdale worked with Canadian graphic artist Hugh Syme. Based on Coverdale's idea, Syme created a Celtic runic-style amulet with various elements representing the Sun, Moon, fertility and others.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Titled "Whitesnake" in the US and Canada, the album was released on 23 March 1987. After entering the "Billboard" 200 chart at 72 on 18 April, it reached Top 10 on 9 May, and Top 5 on 30 May. Having peaked at number 2, the album hovered at or near its peak position over the course of seven months from 13 June 1987 to 23 January 1988, spending in total more weeks inside the top five than any other album in 1987 and charting for 76 weeks in total. It was barred from the top spot for 10 non-consecutive weeks by three different albums, including U2's "The Joshua Tree", Whitney Houston's "Whitney", and mostly Michael Jackson's "Bad". According to Coverdale, the album was selling record-high for Warner Bros. "between 10 AM and noon, which was like 390,000" copies, the radio pushed it further to 800,000 copies, but the difference was MTV. It sold four million copies in all and as such was certified four-times Platinum by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on 2 December 1987, and five-times Platinum on 7 January 1988. The last RIAA certification was eight-times Platinum on 10 February 1995. Reported total sales worldwide between 1990 and 2017 were more than 10-15 million.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: Whitesnake's initial breakthrough was via album's single "Still of the Night" which video got a "tremendous amount of airplay" on MTV. The album also spawned two "Billboard" Hot 100 hit singles: "Here I Go Again '87" which reached number 1 on 10 October, and "Is This Love" which reached number 2 on 19 December. Both "Here I Go Again" and "Crying in the Rain" had previously been recorded with a different line-up and released on the 1982 album "Saints & Sinners". The re-recording of "Here I Go Again" was advised by record label boss David Geffen and requested by A&R John Kalodner as a negotiation deal with Coverdale to re-record "Crying in the Rain" for the album.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: In Europe, the album was simply called "1987", featuring a different running order and two extra tracks: "Looking for Love" and "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again". Coverdale considers "Looking for Love" one of the best songs he wrote with Sykes, but it was not included in the North American version because of Kalodner's preference for "Children of the Night" and time constraints of vinyl records limited to about 20 minutes a side. These two songs were for the first time released in North America in 1994 on "Whitesnake's Greatest Hits" compilation. In Japan, the album was titled "Serpens Albus" in reference to the illustrated text on the album's artwork, which means "white snake" in Latin, but with the North American tracklist. In Australia, the album was released as "1987" but had the North American track order on the original vinyl, and the European order on CD. In Bulgaria, the album was released on LP and cassette as "1987" and used a slightly modified version of the European track order, without "You're Gonna Break My Heart Again", while "Here I Go Again '87" replaced by "Here I Go Again '87 (Radio Mix)".


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: According to "Chicago Tribune", in the year-end results of "Billboard"'s combined album and singles weekly charts, Whitesnake was among the Top 5 artists of the year with Bon Jovi, U2, Whitney Houston and Madonna, describing them as a "dark horse snuck into the Top 5 by quietly scoring big points with its "Whitesnake" LP, which spent much of the year in the Top 5 but never quite made it to No. 1. The band also scored big with 'Here I Go Again', a sleeper that had just one week at No. 1 but wound up as one of the year's Top 10 singles". According to "Billboard", the band was also 8th among Top 100 Pop Album Artists, 22th among Top 100 Pop Singles Artists, 6th among Top 25 Pop Album Artists Duos/Groups and 15h among Top 25 Pop Singles Artists Duos/Groups, the album was 16th among Top 100 Pop Albums and 11th among Top 25 Pop Comact Disks, while single "Here I Go Again" was 7th among Top 100 Pop Singles and 19th among Top 25 Rock Tracks. Later Coverdale recalled that he did not expect such a success, and although was ready for it professionally he was not privately, where was constantly chased by the paparazzi because of which was forced to move from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: For the new line-up of the band, Coverdale enlisted guitarist Adrian Vandenberg (with whom he had already discussed plans), second guitarist Vivian Campbell, bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Tommy Aldridge. This line-up, called as "The Vid[eo] Kids" by Coverdale, toured in support of the album, and all appeared in music videos for "Still of the Night" (which was the most requested video on MTV when it was released), "Is This Love", "Here I Go Again" and "Give Me All Your Love", first three prominently alongside Coverdale's then new partner Tawny Kitaen, all with heavy MTV and radio airplay.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: For the 20th anniversary in May and June 2007, EMI released a remastered reissue of the original European version of the album, featuring two European songs previously unreleased in the North American version, live tracks, and a DVD with video clips and live performances.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: For the 30th anniversary, on 6 October 2017, were released by Rhino Entertainment and Parlophone, the catalog division of Warner Music Group, a super deluxe edition (4CD/DVD box set containing the original album full tracklist in a newly remastered format along with a live recording from their 1987-1988 tour, demos and rehearsals, remixes and the DVD of music videos and tour bootlegs, as well as a book and a booklet with lyrics), a 1CD edition, a 2CD edition (second CD "Snakeskin Boots" includes live recordings from 1987 to 1988 tour), and 2LP edition (second LP including some remixes and live recordings).


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: The band with a new lineup went on a long tour which started in-front of over 80,000 people at sold-out Texxas Jam festival on 20 June 1987, and finished at Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, on 15 August 1988. The tour concerts were held in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. During first part of the tour, they were an opening act for Mötley Crüe on their Girls, Girls, Girls Tour with good box-office success.


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: The album was generally met with positive reviews. According to music journalist Mick Wall, the album "wasn't just best Whitesnake album, it was one of the best rock albums of its era", while "Here I Go Again" became a "signature tune for Coverdale and Whitesnake. It's pretty, with beautifully soulful lead vocal for sure, but it's the 'My Way'-type ingredient of the lyrics ... that does it to ya every time". J. D. Considine favorably writing for "Rolling Stone" argued that although the album is perhaps lacking in originality having "every worthwhile mannerism and lick in the heavy-rock vocabulary" and a mixture of styles reminiscent of Led Zeppelin, Scorpions and Foreigner, "what makes it such a guilty pleasure, though, is that Coverdale isn't simply stealing licks; he and guitarist John Sykes understand the structure, pacing and drama of the old Led Zeppelin sound and deserve credit for concocting such a convincing simulacrum". Steve Huey and Bradley Torreano writing for AllMusic gave both North American and European versions the same rating of 4.5 stars out of 5, being "a collection of loud, polished hard rockers, plus the band's best set of pop hooks", however felt the European version is superior due to better tracklist flow and two more songs, especially "Looking for Love", which "a nice slow build to a blustery chorus makes this a classic David Coverdale ballad". The 20th, and 30th anniversary, reissues were also favorably received. The exception to these reviews was Robert Christgau, who in his negative review deemed that "the attraction of this veteran pop-metal has got to be total predictability. The glistening solos, the surging crescendos, the familiar macho love rhymes, the tunes you can hum before the verse is over--not one heard before, yet every one somehow known".


title: Whitesnake (album)

text: In 2019, magazine "Rolling Stone" ranked the album 12th among "50 Greatest Hair Metal Albums of All Time". In 2020, "Metal Hammer" included it among Top 20 best metal albums of 1987. In 2006, the 1987 version of "Here I Go Again" was ranked number 17 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the '80s. In 2012 Reader's Poll of "Rolling Stone" it ranked as 9th among Top 10 "The Best Hair Metal Songs of All Time", while in 2017, "The Daily Telegraph" included it among 21 best power ballads. In 2015, "Classic Rock" ranked "Is This Love" as 7th on their list of Top 40 greatest power ballads. In 2009, the song "Still of the Night" was named as the 27th best hard rock song of all time by VH1. Its success in the US boosted its predecessor, "Slide It In" (1984), from Gold to double Platinum status by RIAA. It would see the band receive a nomination at the 1988 Brit Awards for Best British Group, as well as a nomination at the American Music Awards of 1988 for Favorite Pop/Rock Album.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In 1932–1933, a famine known as the Holodomor killed 3.3–5 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader Soviet famine of 1932–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the Soviet Union. Scholars debate "whether the man-made Soviet famine was a central act in a campaign of genocide," or whether it was intended to drive Ukrainian peasants into "collectives and ensure a steady supply of grain for Soviet industrialization."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: According to historian Simon Payaslian, the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide, whereas historian J. Arch Getty had stated in 2000 that the scholarly consensus classified the Holodomor as the result of bungling and rigidity rather than a genocidal plan. Other scholars say it remains a significant issue in modern politics and dispute whether Soviet policies would fall under the legal definition of genocide. Scholars who reject the argument that state policy in regard to the famine was genocide do not absolve Joseph Stalin or any other parts of the Soviet regime as a whole from guilt for the famine deaths, and may still view such policies as being ultimately criminal in nature.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Since 2006, political campaigns have sought recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, and, as of 2015, 15 countries have recognised the Holodomor as a genocide.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Professor of political science James Mace helped British historian Robert Conquest complete the book "The Harvest of Sorrow", and after that he was the only U.S. historian working on the Ukrainian famine, and the first to categorically name it as a genocide, while Soviet archives remained closed and without direct evidence of the authorities' intent. In his 1986 article "The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine" written before the archives were opened in 1987, Mace wrote:For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Mace, staff director for the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, compiled a 1988 "Report to Congress", he stated that, based on anecdotal evidence, the Soviets had purposely prevented Ukrainians from leaving famine-struck regions; this was later confirmed by the discovery of Stalin's January 1933 secret decree "Preventing the Mass Exodus of Peasants who are Starving", restricting travel by peasants after "in the Kuban and Ukraine a massive outflow of peasants 'for bread' has begun", that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power." Roman Serbyn called this document one of the "smoking gun revelations about the genocide." One of the nineteen main conclusions of the Report to Congress was that "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In 1986, British historian Robert Conquest published "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine", dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Stalin's direction in 1929–1931 and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Conquest replied in 2003, "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Historian John Archibald Getty, in a critique of "The Harvest of Sorrow", which asserted Conquest's original claim that the famine constituted a genocide, states that the conclusion of the famine being engineered is a tempting one but that it is poorly supported by and requires a highly stretched interpretation of the evidence, but that Stalin nonetheless was the entity most responsible for the disaster, citing his role as the prime-backer of hardline collectivisation and excessive demands on the peasantry.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Firstly, Getty calls into question the estimate of the death toll at around five million Ukrainians presented in "The Harvest of Sorrow" as being much too high, citing much lower demographic estimates from Stephen Wheatcroft, Barbara Anderson, and Brian Silver, and notes that the severity of the famine varied greatly between local regions of Ukraine. Secondly, Getty says that the book fails to provide a convincing motive for genocide, and that other explanations for the famine better fit the evidence than the intentional genocide thesis. Getty points to the fact that Stalin's power was not absolute during these years of his rule, and that he had limited de facto control over local bureaucrats, with many of the Kremlin's orders regarding collectivisation during this time being subverted or ignored at lower levels of the chain of command; in some regions, local bureaucrats exceeded Stalin's demands for expropriation of kulaks, whereas in others, Stalin's demands for expropriation were disregarded and contravened. Moreover, even Stalin's own plans during this time period were frequently unclear and subject to constant change, furthering confusion among the lower bureaucracy and the peasantry; in some districts, farms were collectivised, then decollectivised, and then collectivised yet again within the span of less than a year. Getty also attributes the failure of Soviet authorities to relieve the famine once they realised it was going on to Stalin's paranoia and chaotic decision-making, and that as with his reaction to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, the delays by the central government to adequately respond to the crisis stemmed from Stalin's intense distrust even of his own advisors rather than a calculated, deliberate effort to prolong the starvation.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and initiated the Genocide Convention, claimed that Holodomor "is a classic example of the Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation". Lemkin stated that, because Ukrainian nation was very sensitive to the racial murder of its people and way too populous, the government could not follow the pattern of the Holocaust. Instead the extermination consisted of four steps:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Professor of East European studies Norman Naimark states that the Holodomor's deaths were intentional and thus were genocide. In his 2010 book "Stalin's Genocides", Naimark wrote:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: The Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide. There is enough evidence—if not overwhelming evidence—to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Professor of history Timothy Snyder stated that the starvation was "deliberate" and that several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. In his 2010 book "Bloodlands", Snyder stated:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine... It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In a 2017 Q&A, Snyder said that he believed the famine was genocide but refrained from using the term because it might confuse people, explaining:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: If you asked me, is the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide? Yes, in my view, it is. In my view, it meets the criteria of the law of genocide of 1948, the Convention – it meets the ideas that Raphael Lemkin laid down. Is Armenia genocide? Yes, I believe legally it very easily meets that qualification. I just don't think that means what people think it means. Because there are people who hear the word "genocide" and they think it means the attempt to kill every man woman and child, and the Armenian genocide is closer to the Holocaust than most other cases, right, but it's not the same thing. So, I hesitate to use "genocide" because I think every time the word "genocide" is used it provokes misunderstanding.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: According to Italian historian and professor , the Holodomor constituted a genocide. And was, "the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment"


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Graziosi noted that even under the most restrictive definitions of genocide, "deliberately inflicting on members of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is listed as a genocidal act. He also cited the time Lemkin had commented that, “generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation…It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.”.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Graziosi also emphazized the root of the genocide was "unquestionably a subjective act" which was to use the famine in an "anti-Ukrainian sense on the basis of the 'national interpretation'". Without this, Graziosi said, the death toll would have been at most in the hundreds of thousands.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine such as increased procurement rate, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which the paper argues demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians. Nancy Qian notes in a lecture about the paper that these results are entirely consistent "with a model of ethnic bias and mass killing" for the famine presented by other authors.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Professors R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft state the famine was man-made but unintentional. They believe that a combination of rapid industrialization and two successive bad harvests (1931 and 1932) were the primary reason of the famine. Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies towards the peasants were brutal and ruthless and do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the massive famine deaths; Wheatcroft says that the Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide. Wheatcroft comments that nomadic and peasant culture was destroyed by Soviet collectivization, which complies with Raphael Lemkin's older concept of genocide, which included cultural destruction as an aspect of the crime, such as that of North American Indians and Australian Aborigines.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: We all agreed that Stalin's policy was brutal and ruthless and that its cover up was criminal, but we do not believe that it was done on purpose to kill people and cannot therefore be described as murder or genocide... Davies and I have (2004) produced the most detailed account of the grain crisis in these years, showing the uncertainties in the data and the mistakes carried out by a generally ill-informed, and excessively ambitious, government. The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding were evident... But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the 'man-made on purpose' side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the 'famine as a genocide'. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: According to them [Davies and Wheatcroft], only taking an action whose sole objective is to cause deaths among the peasantry counts as intent. Taking an action with some other goal (e.g. exporting grain to import machinery) but which the actor "certainly knows" will also cause peasants to starve does not count as intentionally starving the peasants. However, this is an interpretation of 'intent' which flies in the face of the general legal interpretation.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Wheatcroft and Davies noted that Conquest (the author of "The Harvest of Sorrow") would later go on to walk back much of the claims made in his earlier book. In a 2003 letter, Conquest clarified to them that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put "Soviet interest" other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it." In a 2008 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Conquest further stated of the famine that "I don't think the word genocide as such is a very useful one... the trouble is it implies that somebody, some other nation, or a large part of it were doing it... But I don't think this is true – it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Professor of economics Michael Ellman states that Stalin clearly committed crimes against humanity but whether he committed genocide depends on the definition of the term. In his 2007 article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited", he wrote:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Team-Stalin's behaviour in 1930 – 34 clearly constitutes a crime against humanity (or a series of crimes against humanity) as that is defined in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court article 7, subsection 1 (d) and (h)[.]... Was Team-Stalin also guilty of genocide? That depends on how 'genocide' is defined... The first physical element is the export of grain during a famine... The second physical element was the ban on migration from Ukraine and the North Caucasus... The third physical element is that 'Stalin made no effort to secure grain assistance from abroad[.]'... If the present author were a member of the jury trying this case he would support a verdict of not guilty (or possibly the Scottish verdict of not proven). The reasons for this are as follows. First, the three physical elements in the alleged crime can all be given non-genocidal interpretations. Secondly, the two mental elements are not unambiguous evidence of genocide. Suspicion of an ethnic group may lead to genocide, but by itself is not evidence of genocide. Hence it would seem that the necessary proof of specific intent is lacking.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "[m]any other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of [many Western countries]", such as the Atlantic slave trade, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Hiroaki Kuromiya states that although the famine was man-made and much of the deaths could have been avoided had it not been for Stalin's agricultural policies, he finds the evidence for the charge of genocide to be insufficient, and states that it is unlikely that Stalin intentionally caused the famine to kill millions, that he used famine as an alternative to the ethnic deportations that were commonly used as collective punishment under Stalin's rule, or that the famine was specifically engineered to target Ukrainians.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Noting that Stalin had few qualms with killing opponents of his rule and directly ordered several episodes of mass murder, Kuromiya finds the absence of an order to engineer a famine as punishment as unusual, in contrast to the Great Purge and the various deportations and 'national operations' which he personally ordered, and as pointing to the unlikelihood of Stalin deliberately orchestrating mass starvation. He also cites several measures taken by the Soviet government that, although ineffective, provide evidence against the intentionalist thesis, such as nine occasions of curtailing grain exports from different famine-stricken regions and clandestinely purchasing foreign aid to help alleviate the famine. He goes on to suggest that the prioritisation of military food stockpiles over the peasantry was likely motivated by Stalin's paranoia about what he believed to be an impending war with Japan and/or Poland rather than a desire to deliberately starve Ukrainians to death.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Ronald Grigor Suny contrasts the intentions and motivation for the Holodomor and other Soviet mass killings with those of the Armenian genocide. He states that "although on moral grounds one form of mass killing is as reprehensible as another", for social scientists and historians "there is utility in restricting the term 'genocide' to what might more accurately be referred to as 'ethnocide,' that is, the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group." His definition of genocide, it "involves both the physical and the cultural extermination of a people."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Suny states that "Stalin's intentions and actions during the Ukrainian famine, no matter what sensationalist claims are made by nationalists and anti-Communists, were not the extermination of the Ukrainian people", and "a different set of explanations is required" for the Holodomor as well as for the Great Purges, the Gulag, and the Soviet ethnic cleansings of minority ethnic groups.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: According to Stephen Kotkin, while "there is no question of Stalin's responsibility for the famine" and many deaths could have been prevented if not for the "insufficient" and counterproductive Soviet measures, there is no evidence for Stalin's intention to kill the Ukrainians deliberately. According to Kotkin, the Holodomor "was a foreseeable byproduct of the collectivization campaign that Stalin forcibly imposed, but not an intentional murder. He needed the peasants to produce more grain, and to export the grain to buy the industrial machinery for the industrialization. Peasant output and peasant production was critical for Stalin's industrialization."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Historian Viktor Kondrashin asserts that Stalin's forced collectivisation programme drastically decreased peasants' quality of life and that it was the leading catalyst of the famine, and that although a notable drought did occur in 1931, it and other natural factors were not the primary causes of the famine. However, he rejects the claim that the famine was a targeted genocide of Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in the Soviet Union. According to Kondrashin, in some aspects, conditions for peasants were actually even worse and oppressive laws concerning agriculture even harsher in the Russian regions of the Kuban and Lower Volga, making the genocide thesis untenable in his view. While dismissing the notion that the famine was a genocide, Kondrashin does note, however, that Stalin took advantage of the famine crisis to neutralise the Ukrainian intelligentsia on the pretexts that they were a subversive force behind anti-Soviet uprisings by peasants. Kondrashin also assigns part of the blame for the famine to foreign governments that continued to trade with and buy food from the Soviet Union, in particular the United Kingdom, which imported approximately two million tonnes of Soviet grain during the famine years of 1932 and 1933.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Mark Tauger, professor of history at West Virginia University, stated that the 1932 harvest was 30–40% smaller than official statistics and that the famine was "the result of a failure of economic policy, of the 'revolution from above'", not "a 'successful' nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups." In his 1991 article "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Tauger wrote:


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as "man-made" or "artificial."... Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population... New Soviet archival data show that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than has been assumed and call for revision of the genocide interpretation. The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933... Thus for Ukraine, the official sown area (18.1 million hectares) reduced by the share of sown area actually harvested (93.8 percent) to a harvested area of 17 million hectares and multiplied by the average yield (approximately 5 centners) gives a total harvest of 8.5 million tons, or a little less than 60 percent of the official 14.6 million tons.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Tauger stated that "the harsh 1932–1933 procurements only displaced the famine from urban areas" but the low harvest "made a famine inevitable." Tauger stated that it is difficult to accept the famine "as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide" but that "the regime was still responsible for the deprivation and suffering of the Soviet population in the early 1930s", and "if anything, these data show that the effects of [collectivization and forced industrialization] were worse than has been assumed."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: Davies and Wheatcroft criticized Tauger's methodology in the 2004 edition of "The Years of Hunger". Tauger criticized Davies and Wheatcroft's methodology in a 2006 article. In the 2009 edition of their book, Davies and Wheatcroft apologized for "an error in our calculations of the 1932 [grain] yield" and stated grain yield was "between 55 and 60 million tons, a low harvest, but substantially higher than Tauger's 50 million." While they disagree on the exact tonnage of the harvest, they reach a similar conclusion as Tauger in their book's most recent edition and state that "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions", and "in our own work we, like V.P. Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a programme of genocide against Ukraine... We do not think it appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of a policy as 'organised' by the policy-makers."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In a 2002 article for "The Ukrainian Weekly", David R. Marples criticized Tauger's choice of rejecting state figures in favour of those from collective farms, where there was an incentive to underestimate yields, and he argued that Tauger's conclusion is incorrect because in his view "there is no such thing as a 'natural' famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input." Marples criticized Tauger and other scholars for failing "to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine", commenting that people died in the millions in Ukraine but not in Russia because "the 'massive program of rationing and relief' was selective."


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: After campaigns from the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, the governments of various countries have issued statements recognizing the Holodomor as genocide including Ukraine and 14 other countries, , including Australia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Mexico, Peru and Poland.


title: Holodomor genocide question

text: In November 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by Germany, Ireland, Moldova, Romania, and the Belarusian opposition in exile. Pope Francis compared the Russian war in Ukraine with its targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure to the "terrible Holodomor Genocide", during an address at St. Peter's Square.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: Hollywood Pictures was an American film production label of Walt Disney Studios, founded and owned by The Walt Disney Company. Established on February 1, 1989, by then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner and then-studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hollywood Pictures was founded to increase the film output of the Walt Disney Studios, and release films similar to those of Touchstone Pictures, that featured mature themes targeted to adult audiences than those produced by the studio's flagship Walt Disney Pictures division. After years of hiatus, the label was shuttered on April 27, 2007.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: Hollywood Pictures' most commercially successful film was M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense", which grossed over $670 million worldwide upon its 1999 release.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: Hollywood Pictures Corporation was incorporated on March 30, 1984 and was activated on February 1, 1989. Ricardo Mestres was appointed the division's first president, moving from Disney's Touchstone Pictures. The division was formed to create opportunities for up-and-coming executives and to double Disney's feature-film output in order to fill the gap left by the contraction in the industry, which included closure of MGM/UA's United Artists and financial problems at Lorimar-Telepictures and De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. With Touchstone aligned with Hollywood, the two Disney production divisions would share the same marketing and distribution staffs. Hollywood was expected to be producing 12 films a year by 1991 and to share funding from the Silver Screen Partners IV. The company's first release was "Arachnophobia" on July 18, 1990.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: On October 23, 1990, The Walt Disney Company formed Touchwood Pacific Partners to supplant the Silver Screen Partnership series as their movie studios' primary funding source.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: After the collapse of their then-recently renewed deal at Paramount Pictures, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer moved their production company to Hollywood Pictures on January 18, 1991.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: The division issued primarily inexpensive comedies for the first six years with a few box office flops, amongst them "Holy Matrimony", "Aspen Extreme", "Super Mario Bros.", "Swing Kids", "Blame It on the Bellboy", "Born Yesterday" and "Guilty as Sin". The division only had one box office success, "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle", and one critical success, "The Joy Luck Club", which did not outweigh the general anemic box office record of the division. On April 26, 1994, Mestres was forced to resign after the lackluster performance of the division. Mestres moved to long term production deal with the studio.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: On June 27, 1994, Michael Lynton was appointed as new division president after moving from the Disney Publishing Group, where he was senior vice president and oversaw domestic publishing units including Hyperion Books. Mestres left Lynton a few potential hits: Robert Redford's "Quiz Show", the Sarah Jessica Parker-Antonio Banderas drama "Miami Rhapsody", and "Dangerous Minds", starring Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1997, Lynton left for a position at Penguin Group. By 2001, Hollywood Pictures had produced 80 films, but its operation had been phased out and its management was merged with that of the flagship Walt Disney Pictures studio.


title: Hollywood Pictures

text: After being dormant for five years, the brand was reactivated for low-budget genre films. Films released by the repurposed Hollywood Pictures were three horror films: "Stay Alive" (released on March 24, 2006), "Primeval" (released on January 12, 2007), and "The Invisible" (released on April 27, 2007). After the latter release, Disney stopped producing and distributing under the label as it announced a focus on the company's core brands of Disney, Touchstone, ABC, ESPN, and Pixar.


title: Emma Grede

text: Emma Grede is a British businesswoman, co-founder and CEO of Good American, a founding partner of Skims, and co-founder of Safely.


title: Emma Grede

text: Grede was born and raised in East London, England. She is the daughter of Jenny-Lee Findlay, an English mother who worked for Morgan Stanley; and a Jamaican and Trinidadian father. She has three younger sisters Charlotte, Rachelle, and Katie-Beth. She was raised by her mother in the Plaistow neighborhood of London. She studied business at the London College of Fashion. After securing an internship at Gucci she dropped out of college.


title: Emma Grede

text: After initially working as a producer at fashion show and events company Inca Productions, in 2008 Grede founded and was CEO of Independent Talent Brand (ITB) Worldwide, a London-based talent management and entertainment marketing agency In 2018, ITB was acquired by Rogers & Cowan, and Grede exited the company.


title: Emma Grede

text: Around 2015, Grede proposed an idea for a denim company to Kris Jenner, explaining that she wanted to partner with Jenner's daughter Khloé Kardashian. Grede and Kardashian launched Good American in 2016, as a women's clothing company focused on size inclusivity and body positivity, with Grede as CEO. The company expanded from strictly selling denim jeans to include dresses, activewear, tops, swimwear, sleepwear, and shoes in its line. They also created the size 15 to accommodate more body types.


title: Emma Grede

text: Grede is a founding partner of Skims, a shapewear brand founded by her husband Jens Grede and Kim Kardashian in 2019. Grede is the company's chief product officer. Along with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen, Grede is the founder of Safely, a brand of plant-based cleaning and self-care products that was launched in March 2021.


title: Emma Grede

text: Grede is a guest shark on the first episode of season 13 of the reality television series "Shark Tank" in 2021. She is chairwoman of the 15 Percent Pledge, an initiative for retailers to reserve 15% of their shelf space for Black-owned businesses.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: A girlfriend experience (GFE) is a commercial sex service that blurs the boundaries between a financial transaction and a romantic relationship. It ranges from a transactional sex relationship to a client paying a sex worker to pretend to be his girlfriend during the session. If the sex worker is male, the service is called a boyfriend experience.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: Within the sex industry of the United States and Canada, GFE is a common term for a sexual encounter in which both the sex worker and the client are willing to engage in reciprocal sexual pleasure and some degree of emotional intimacy. A "girlfriend experience" generally involves more personal interaction than a traditional call girl or escort offers. There is a focus on not just having sex, but also having more of a comprehensive experience. The details vary widely from person to person. In the field of sex work, sex workers impart a sense of authenticity in order to make the experience more pleasurable for their customer, as well as to make the outcome more lucrative for themselves. According to sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, this makes it more meaningful for both client and sex worker as it involves a particular form of emotional labor.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: As an example, a GFE may start with dinner at a restaurant followed by making out on the sofa in an apartment and end with non-rushed sex and cuddling. The experience can include kissing, in contrast to the service traditionally provided by escorts who have a reputation for not kissing their clients.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: The term "client" is often used to describe a person who pays prostitutes for sex. However, in the escort agency code that has grown up around the GFE, clients often call themselves "hobbyists" and refer to a prostitute who provides a GFE as a "nice girl". In a GFE situation, the client would pay for time spent with the call girl meaning: social interaction, dating, or sexual acts. Clients may be from many different backgrounds, such as blue- or white-collar, and of different races or ages. Many clients emerge through the need for a feeling of closeness without the commitment of a relationship. To a certain extent, it eliminates the feeling of guilt or fear of "addiction" to a relationship.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: Indoor prostitution, which includes the use of massage parlors, saunas, brothels, strip clubs and escort agencies, is more likely than street prostitution to involve conversation, affection and mutual sexual pleasure. Some ranch brothels in the United States advertise themselves as GFE establishments, including Dennis Hof's Love Ranch South, Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Kit Kat Ranch and Sheri's Ranch.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: Research in Cambodia published in 2010 identified a number of waitresses and bartenders who were also working as "professional girlfriends" with "western boyfriends". They relied on these relationships for their livelihood but did not regard themselves as "prostitutes" and often sought love and marriage as well as material comforts. In these relationships, there was a performance of intimacy which lay somewhere between the feigned and the genuine.


title: Girlfriend experience

text: In Thailand, some independent sex workers are reported to work as "professional girlfriends", providing company and affection to foreign men and middle-class Thai men, and only having sex with their clients occasionally. Their remuneration is provided in the form of things such as clothing and visits to the cinema.


title: Dave Meltzer

text: David Allen Meltzer (born October 24, 1959) is an American journalist who reports on professional wrestling and mixed martial arts.


title: Dave Meltzer

text: Since 1983, he has been the publisher and editor of the "Wrestling Observer Newsletter" ("WON"). He has also written for the "Oakland Tribune", the "Los Angeles Times", Yahoo! Sports, SI.com, and "The National Sports Daily". He has extensively covered mixed martial arts since UFC 1 in 1993 and currently covers the sport for SB Nation. He has been called "the most accomplished reporter in sports journalism" by Frank Deford of "Sports Illustrated".


title: Dave Meltzer

text: He is also a frequent lecturer on many aspects of the business of MMA, professional wrestling, and boxing at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.


title: Dave Meltzer

text: Meltzer earned a journalism degree from San Jose State University and started out as a sportswriter for the "Wichita Falls Times Record News" and the "Turlock Journal". He demonstrated an interest in professional wrestling and a journalistic approach to it early in life. Meltzer wrote several wrestling-related publications that predate "WON", dating back to 1971. The most notable of these was the "California Wrestling Report", ca. 1973–1974, which reported on the still-extant National Wrestling Alliance territories operating out of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Meltzer comes from a Lithuanian Jewish background.


title: Dave Meltzer

text: The beginnings of the "Wrestling Observer Newsletter" date back to 1980, when Meltzer began an annual poll amongst those with whom he corresponded regarding professional wrestling. According to Meltzer, he was just a fan at first. A short time later, he began maintaining a tape-trading list, and would occasionally send match results and news updates along with tape updates. Meltzer stated that he wanted to keep his friends in college "in the loop" for his tape trading and the happenings in the business, as the mainstream wrestling magazines catered to a somewhat younger demographic.


title: Dave Meltzer

text: Meltzer popularized the star rating system (devised by Jim Cornette and his childhood friend Norm M. Dooley), which rates matches on a scale of zero to five stars (sometimes going to negative five stars in the case of very bad matches) in a similar manner to that used by many movie critics. Meltzer has also given ratings that have exceeded five stars. The first 6 and 6.5 stars took place in 1981. The highest he has ever rated a match was seven stars, given to Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega for their match at Dominion 6.9 in Osaka-jo Hall in June 2018. Wrestlers such as Bret Hart have written how proud they were when their performances were praised in the "WON".


title: Lucky Dube

text: Lucky Philip Dube (pronounced "duu-beh"; 3 August 1964 – 18 October 2007) was a South African reggae musician and rastafarian considered to be one of the most important musicians in the history of African music and one of the greatest reggae musicians of all time.The South African born but globally revered reggae legend recorded 22 albums in Zulu, English, and Afrikaans in a 25-year period and was South Africa's as well as Africa's biggest-selling reggae superstar to date. Dube was murdered in the Johannesburg suburb of Rosettenville on the evening of 18 October 2007.


title: Lucky Dube

text: Lucky Dube was born in Ermelo, formerly of the Eastern Transvaal, now of Mpumalanga, on 3 August 1964. His parents separated before his birth, and he was raised by his mother, who named him "Lucky" because she considered his birth fortunate after a number of failed pregnancies. Along with his two siblings, Thandi and Mandla, Dube spent much of his childhood with his grandmother, Sarah, while his mother relocated to work. In a 1999 interview, he described his grandmother as "his greatest love" who "multiplied many things to bring up this responsible individual that I am today."


title: Lucky Dube

text: As a child Dube worked as a gardener but, as he matured, realizing that he wasn't earning enough to feed his family, he began to attend school. There he joined a choir and with some friends, formed his first musical ensemble called "The Skyway Band". While at school he discovered the Rastafari movement. At the age of 18 Dube joined his cousin's band, The Love Brothers, playing Zulu pop music known as mbaqanga whilst funding his lifestyle by working for Hole and Cooke as a security guard at the car auctions in Midrand. The band signed with Teal Record Company, under Richard Siluma (Teal was later incorporated into Gallo Record Company). Though Dube was still at school, the band recorded material in Johannesburg during his school holidays. The resultant album was released under the name "Lucky Dube and the Supersoul". The second album was released soon afterwards, and this time Dube wrote some of the lyrics in addition to singing. It was around this same time when he began to learn English.


title: Lucky Dube

text: On the release of his fifth album, Dave Segal (who became Dube's sound engineer) encouraged him to drop the "Supersoul" element of the name. All subsequent albums were recorded as "Lucky Dube". At this time Dube began to note fans were responding positively to some reggae songs he played during live concerts. Drawing inspiration from Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh, he felt the socio-political messages associated with Jamaican reggae were relevant to a South African audience in an institutionally racist society.


title: Lucky Dube

text: He decided to try the new musical genre and in 1984, released the mini album "Rastas Never Die". The record sold poorly – around 4000 units – in comparison to the 30,000 units his mbaqanga records would sell. Keen to suppress anti-apartheid activism, the apartheid regime banned the album in 1985, because of its critical lyrics, for instance in the song ""War and Crime"". However, he was not discouraged and continued to perform the reggae tracks live and wrote and produced a second reggae album. "Think About The Children" (1985). It achieved platinum sales status and established Dube as a popular reggae artist in South Africa, in addition to attracting attention outside his homeland.


title: Lucky Dube

text: Dube continued to release commercially successful albums. In 1989, he won four OKTV Awards for "Prisoner", won another for "Captured Live" the following year and yet another two for "House of Exile" the year after. His 1993 album, "Victims," sold over one million copies worldwide. In 1995, he earned a worldwide recording contract with Motown. His album "Trinity" was the first release on Tabu Records after Motown's acquisition of the label.


title: Lucky Dube

text: In 1996, he released a compilation album, "Serious Reggae Business", which led to him being named the "Best Selling African Recording Artist" at the World Music Awards and the "International Artist of the Year" at the Ghana Music Awards. His next three albums each won South African Music Awards. His album, "Respect", earned a European release through a deal with Warner Music. Dube toured internationally, sharing stages with artists such as Sinéad O'Connor, Peter Gabriel, and Sting. He appeared at the 1991 Reggae Sunsplash (uniquely that year, was invited back on stage for a 25-minute-long encore) and the 2005 Live 8 event in Johannesburg.


title: Lucky Dube

text: In addition to performing music Dube was a sometime actor, appearing in the feature films "Voice in the Dark", "Getting Lucky," and "Lucky Strikes Back".


title: Lucky Dube

text: Lucky Dube is considered to be especially remarkable as a Dub Artist due to his lack of a diasporic cultural base. This was particularly due to the nature of Reggae and Dub being a platform for expression of displacement from the homeland. In "Prisoner", the South African artist makes the genre his own by applying themes of apartheid and internal displacement. In the song and music video, he is found disturbing the bounds of the genre by highlighting the toils of his own homeland. He was revolutionary in so far as he introduced a competing version to Reggae's constant tendency of romanticizing the utopian homeland of Africa.


title: Lucky Dube

text: Dube took Dub and used it as a platform to promote racial equality within Africa during the Apartheid. He used dub to frame his arguments about colonialism and the African Slave trade, and how he felt that Africa should be reclaimed by the black race.


title: Lucky Dube

text: On 18 October 2007, Lucky Dube was killed by armed robbers in Rosettenville, a Johannesburg suburb, shortly after dropping two of his seven children off at their uncle's house. Dube was driving his Chrysler 300C, which the assailants were after. Police reports suggest he was shot dead by carjackers who did not recognise him and believed that he was a Nigerian. Five men were arrested in connection with the murder; three were tried and found guilty on 31 March 2009. Two of the men attempted to escape and were caught. The men were sentenced to life in prison.


title: Lucky Dube

text: On 21 October 2008, Rykodisc released a compilation album entitled "Retrospective", which featured many of Dube's most influential songs as well as previously unreleased tracks in the United States. The album celebrated Dube's music and honored the contributions he made to South Africa.


title: Lucky Dube

text: The Roots Reggae Library has taken steps to store digital versions of the Mbaqange albums made in the 80's. Five of the six albums have been retrieved. "Ngikwethembe Na" has yet to be found.


title: Lucky Dube

text: As one of the first artists to bring African reggae to the mainstream, Dube bridged cultural gaps within the African diaspora. What Lucky Dube's music did was "[present] a praxis of cross-culturality and visionary possibility" that the diaspora at large tends to erase. Dube gave Africa a voice and put its culture on the global stage by joining the global reggae community. Through taking Jamaican roots music back to its roots, he recontextualized the oppression and political struggles that reggae seeps itself in, bringing the basis of the diaspora back in conversation with the diaspora at large to allow for a more pan-African form of cultural expression. Dube's roots reggae brought African people to the table in terms of conversation about the black diaspora by mimicking Caribbean artists' assertions of African authenticity or racial utopia. Lucky Dube ultimately shows how Africans have to find their way into the conversations of the Black Diaspora by mimicking their assertions of African authenticity or racial utopia. Dube catalyzed roots reggae's appearance as a popular form of protest song. This helped “legitimize and strengthen the oppositional gesture in popular African music and culture, particularly for those generations born after decolonization.


title: Lucky Dube

text: On 18 October 2017, Gallo Records South Africa released a 25 track limited edition commemorative album titled "The Times We've Shared". The album features his biggest hits exclusive performances and 3 previously unreleased tracks.


title: Lucky Dube

text: In Australia, Lucky Dube's music has found resonance in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, and his popularity has led Lucky Dube to be called "Bigger than the Beatles" throughout much of central and northern Australia. In 2005, Dube was a touring act in Alice Springs, in central Australia, promoted by entrepreneur Scott Boocock, on advice from his friend, Joe Miller, a disc jockey on local First Nations radio station CAAMA Radio, and he had noted that Dube's popularity was growing. Dube's Australian tour started in May 2005, and he played in Alice Springs (to a crowd of 4,000 people), Darwin, Northern Territory, and Cairns, Queensland.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Doink the Clown is a professional wrestling persona originally and most popularly portrayed by Matt Osborne, who debuted the Doink persona in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in 1992. Doink is a clown (or evil clown) wearing traditional clown makeup (or a mask decorated to resemble such) and brightly colored clothes. In addition to Borne, Doink has been portrayed occasionally by other wrestlers in the WWF (now WWE) and unofficially on the independent circuit.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Former WWE producer Bruce Prichard said in an interview on "The Steve Austin Show" that Michael Hegstrand had originally conceived the idea of a miserable clown character.


title: Doink the Clown

text: After making appearances in late 1992 in the crowd and at ringside, playing tricks on the fans and wrestlers, the Doink character made his in-ring debut in the WWF in 1993, originally wrestling as a technically sound heel. Doink played cruel jokes on both fans and wrestlers to both amuse himself and catch his victims off-guard. Some of his villainous pranks included tripping Big Boss Man with a tripwire, "accidentally" poking Tatanka in the eye with a mop, dumping water on Marty Jannetty and attacking Crush with a loaded prosthetic arm. He clashed with Crush at WrestleMania IX, a match which he won after the appearance of an identical Doink (played by Steve Keirn) from underneath the ring. Doink also wrestled Randy Savage on "Monday Night Raw", and substituted for Jerry Lawler, who faked an injury, against Bret Hart at SummerSlam in 1993.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Doink then turned on Lawler on the September 26 episode of "WWF Wrestling Challenge" in Lawler's The King's Court segment, making Burger King jokes to amuse the crowd and eventually emptied a bucket of water over Lawler. Matt Borne, the original man behind Doink, was fired for recurring drug abuses, eventually leaving the gimmick (after bouncing through a few others) to Ray Licameli (also known as Ray Apollo). Now as a fan favorite and with a new midget sidekick Dink, Doink was more of a comic relief character, but continued to pull pranks on other wrestlers (albeit more harmless and silly than outright cruel), mostly on heels like Lawler and Bobby Heenan, even throwing a bucket of confetti on Bam Bam Bigelow once. Doink and Dink also battled with Bigelow and Luna Vachon in a feud that culminated at WrestleMania X. Doink would later encounter Jerry Lawler again in a match at Survivor Series. In this match, Doink and Dink teamed with Wink and Pink to meet Lawler's dwarf team of 'little kings' Queazy, Cheezy, and Sleazy. Eventually, Doink became a jobber, regularly losing to wrestlers like Jeff Jarrett, Hakushi, Waylon Mercy and, in his final televised match in September 1995, to Hunter Hearst Helmsley. On March 9, 1996 Doink defeated Zip on a WWF house show in Bangalore, India. Doink reemerged one last time in 1997 at the Slammy Awards and was attacked by Stone Cold Steve Austin, amidst crowd chants of "kill the clown".


title: Doink the Clown

text: Doink (Matt Osborne) also had a few matches in 1994 in southeast Michigan. He faced off against Bastion Booger on July 14, 1994, in Port Huron, Michigan. He also wrestled alongside some other now known names such as Al Snow and Terry Funk when wrestling for MTW.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Following his departure from the WWF, Osborne appeared (as Matt Borne) in Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) for several matches as Doink in a blue and green clown suit, setting up an angle where ECW champion Shane Douglas criticized Vince McMahon for turning a talented wrestler like Borne into a comic relief character, and claimed that he knew how to bring out Borne's full potential. Borne then made a few appearances with Douglas as "himself", sporting his face half-painted with the Doink makeup. His attitude insinuated that he had developed borderline personality disorder from having been forced to wrestle as a clown; after winning matches he would dress his opponent in clown accessories to humiliate them. His ring name under this gimmick was "Borne Again".


title: Doink the Clown

text: Since 1997, Doink has appeared sporadically in WWE. Ray Apollo returned to play him in the Gimmick Battle Royal at WrestleMania X-Seven. On December 10, 2007, Doink, played by Matt Borne for the final time, participated in a battle royal of 15 WWE alumni for the "Raw" 15th anniversary special episode.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Played by Nick Dinsmore, he showed up in the A.P.A. Bar Room Brawl at Vengeance in 2003. He was selected by Rhino to face Chris Benoit on the July 31, 2003 "Smackdown!".


title: Doink the Clown

text: Played by Steve Lombardi, he wrestled Rob Conway on an October 2005 episode of "Raw". On June 2, 2007, Doink, Eugene and Kane defeated Umaga, Viscera and Kevin Thorn on "Saturday Night's Main Event XXXIV". On the July 12, 2010 "Raw", Doink teamed with William Regal, Primo and Zack Ryder to lose to Santino Marella, Goldust, Vladimir Kozlov and The Great Khali, when he was pinned by Khali. On the July 2, 2012 "Raw", he made a surprise return and lost to Heath Slater. He reappeared on July 23, alongside several other WWE alumni, to help Lita take down Slater on "WWE Raw 1000", the one thousandth episode of "Raw". This is, to date, Doink's final official appearance on WWE television.


title: Doink the Clown

text: In early 2010, Osborne reinvented the Doink character to resemble Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker in "The Dark Knight", nicknaming the incarnation 'Reborne Again'. The new character debuted on March 27 for ISPW in New Jersey. On May 23, 2010, Doink the Clown, portrayed by Dusty Wolfe, interfered against Skandor Akbar and his men Dr. Knuckles and Rommel. This caused them to lose the Wrecking Ball Wrestling tag titles. In retaliation Akbar called on the original Doink Matt Borne. Wolfe and Borne were scheduled to meet on August 15, but Wolfe never arrived at the event. On August 8, 2010, Borne, as Doink the Clown, won the Wrecking Ball Wrestling Championship.


title: Doink the Clown

text: Doink is a playable character in Acclaim's 1994 video game, "WWF Raw", Midway's "" (1995), and THQ's "SmackDown vs. Raw 2009" (2008, as a DLC character). Doink was also revealed as a post-launch superstar for "WWE 2K Battlegrounds" (2020) and headlined the "Clowning Around Pack" DLC in "WWE 2K22" (2022) (the latter in his heel persona).


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Michael Greyeyes (born June 4, 1967) (Muskeg Lake Cree Nation) is an Indigenous Canadian actor, dancer, choreographer, director, and educator.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: In 1996, Greyeyes portrayed Crazy Horse in the television film "Crazy Horse". In 2018, Greyeyes portrayed Sitting Bull in "Woman Walks Ahead" to critical acclaim. He has also had TV roles on "Fear the Walking Dead", "True Detective" and "I Know This Much Is True". In 2021–2022, he had a main role in the sitcom "Rutherford Falls". He won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards in 2021, for his performance in the zombie film "Blood Quantum".


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Born in Saskatchewan, Greyeyes is Plains Cree from the Muskeg Lake First Nation. His father was from the Muskeg Lake First Nation and his mother was from the Sweetgrass First Nation, both located in Saskatchewan. Greyeyes started his performance career as a dancer. He is a graduate of The National Ballet School in 1984. He became an apprentice with The National Ballet of Canada before joining the company as a Corps de Ballet member in 1987.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: After three years, he moved to New York City in 1990 to join the company of modern dance choreographer Eliot Feld. Greyeyes performed in many of Feld's seminal works, including "Intermezzo", "Skara Brae", and "The Jig is Up". He performed in roles created for him in such ballets as "Common Ground" and "Bloom's Wake". After years of also working as an actor, Greyeyes later completed his master's degree in Fine Arts at the School of Theatre and Dance at Kent State University and graduated in May 2003.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Greyeyes began his acting career in 1993, when he was cast as Juh in TNT's "Geronimo". This role led to numerous television appearances, including guest-starring performances in "", "Walker, Texas Ranger", "Numb3rs", "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman", and Millennium". In 1998 he starred in "", with Janine Turner and Patrick Bergen. He is featured in the mini-series "Klondike", "Dreamkeeper", "Rough Riders", "Big Bear", and "True Women".


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: His films include: "Dance Me Outside", "Smoke Signals", "Sunshine State", "Skipped Parts", "Skinwalkers" (based on the book by Tony Hillerman), and "Woman Walks Ahead" (2017), in which he played Chief Sitting Bull opposite Jessica Chastain as a portrait painter.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Greyeyes also continued his dance research on the modern form of traditional dancing, Powwow. His journey of exploration was documented in "He Who Dreams: Michael on the Powwow Trail" for CBC Television by Adrienne Clarkson. He choreographed and performed in Rebecca Belmore's durational performance art work "Gone Indian" for Toronto's "Nuit Blanche".


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Greyeyes continues to act and dance regularly. His more recent works include "The New World" directed by Terrence Malick, "Tecumseh's Vision", a PBS documentary/live action drama, and "Passchendaele", which opened the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. "Triptych" (a short film broadcast nationally on Bravo! Television), and


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: "Untitled #1535" is a site-specific dance work he choreographed for Dusk Dances. "The Journey" ("Pimooteewin") is an opera he directed with music by Melissa Hui and libretto by Tomson Highway.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: He did the voice of Tommy in the action game "Prey". He played a recurring role on "Fear The Walking Dead" (2017).


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: In 2010, Greyeyes founded Signal Theatre, a company that explores intercultural and transdisciplinary live performance. As Artistic Director and choreographer, he has overseen the creation of three major works, including "From thine eyes" (Harbourfront Centre), "Nôhkom" (The Banff Centre), and "A Soldier's Tale" (Fleck Dance Theatre), a work examining the aftermath of war upon soldiers and their families. He has said that he "was not interested in staging ethnicity." "A Soldier's Tale" was co-produced by The National Arts Centre and The Canada Dance Festival and opened the 2014 Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa at the NAC Theatre. Signal Theater has also produced installations and performance art works, such as "Winter Home", which premiered in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Greyeyes won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards in 2021, for his performance in the zombie film "Blood Quantum". He has played the main role of Terry Thomas, CEO of a fictional tribe's casino on the Peacock TV series "Rutherford Falls" (2021-2022).


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: In 2021 Greyeyes was signed to a first look deal with Blumhouse Productions. Greyeyes appears as John Rainbird in the 2022 film "Firestarter", based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.


title: Michael Greyeyes

text: Greyeyes is an Associate Professor of Theatre at York University. He is married to Nancy Latoszewski. They have two daughters, Lilia and Eva, born in 2002 and 2004.


title: Discourse

text: Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.


title: Discourse

text: In the humanities and social sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourse is a social boundary that defines what statements can be said about a topic. Many definitions of discourse are largely derived from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. In sociology, "discourse" is defined as "any practice (found in a wide range of forms) by which individuals imbue reality with meaning".


title: Discourse

text: Political science sees discourse as closely linked to politics and policy making. Likewise, different theories among various disciplines understand discourse as linked to power and state, insofar as the control of "discourses" is understood as a hold on reality itself (e.g. if a state controls the media, they control the "truth"). In essence, "discourse" is inescapable, since any use of language will have an effect on individual perspectives. In other words, the chosen discourse provides the vocabulary, expressions, or style needed to communicate. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements, describing them either as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists".


title: Discourse

text: In psychology, discourses are embedded in different rhetorical genres and meta-genres that constrain and enable them—language talking about language. This is exemplified in the APA's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", which tells of the terms that have to be used in speaking about mental health, thereby mediating meanings and dictating practices of professionals in psychology and psychiatry.


title: Discourse

text: Modernist theorists were focused on achieving progress and believed in the existence of natural and social laws which could be used universally to develop knowledge and thus a better understanding of society. Such theorists would be preoccupied with obtaining the "truth" and "reality", seeking to develop theories which contained certainty and predictability. Modernist theorists therefore understood discourse to be functional. Discourse and language transformations are ascribed to progress or the need to develop new or more "accurate" words to describe new discoveries, understandings, or areas of interest. In modernist theory, language and discourse are dissociated from power and ideology and instead conceptualized as "natural" products of common sense usage or progress. Modernism further gave rise to the liberal discourses of rights, equality, freedom, and justice; however, this rhetoric masked substantive inequality and failed to account for differences, according to Regnier.


title: Discourse

text: Structuralist theorists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, argue that all human actions and social formations are related to language and can be understood as systems of related elements. This means that the "individual elements of a system only have significance when considered in relation to the structure as a whole, and that structures are to be understood as self-contained, self-regulated, and self-transforming entities". In other words, it is the structure itself that determines the significance, meaning and function of the individual elements of a system. Structuralism has made an important contribution to our understanding of language and social systems. Saussure's theory of language highlights the decisive role of meaning and signification in structuring human life more generally.


title: Discourse

text: Following the perceived limitations of the modern era, emerged postmodern theory. Postmodern theorists rejected modernist claims that there was one theoretical approach that explained all aspects of society. Rather, postmodernist theorists were interested in examining the variety of experiences of individuals and groups and emphasized differences over similarities and common experiences.


title: Discourse

text: In contrast to modernist theory, postmodern theory is more fluid, allowing for individual differences as it rejects the notion of social laws. Such theorists shifted away from truth-seeking, and instead sought answers for how truths are produced and sustained. Postmodernists contended that truth and knowledge are plural, contextual, and historically produced through discourses. Postmodern researchers therefore embarked on analyzing discourses such as texts, language, policies, and practices.


title: Discourse

text: In the works of the philosopher Michel Foucault, a "discourse" is “an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements ("énoncés").” The enouncement ("l’énoncé", “the statement”) is a linguistic construct that allows the writer and the speaker to assign meaning to words and to communicate repeatable semantic relations to, between, and among the statements, objects, or subjects of the discourse. There exist internal relations among the signs (semiotic sequences) that are between and among the statements, objects, or subjects of the discourse. The term "discursive formation" identifies and describes written and spoken statements with semantic relations that produce discourses. As a researcher, Foucault applied the discursive formation to analyses of large bodies of knowledge, e.g. political economy and natural history.


title: Discourse

text: In "The Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), a treatise about the methodology and historiography of systems of thought (“epistemes”) and of knowledge (“discursive formations”), Michel Foucault developed the concepts of discourse. The sociologist Iara Lessa summarizes Foucault's definition of discourse as "systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs, and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak." Foucault traces the role of discourse in the legitimation of society's power to construct contemporary truths, to maintain said truths, and to determine what relations of power exist among the constructed truths; therefore discourse is a communications medium through which power relations produce men and women who can speak.


title: Discourse

text: The inter-relation between power and knowledge renders every human relationship into a power negotiation, because power is always present and so produces and constrains the truth. Power is exercised through rules of exclusion (discourses) that determine what subjects people can discuss; when, where, and how a person may speak; and determines which persons are allowed speak. That knowledge is both the "creator" of power and the "creation" of power, Foucault coined the term "power-knowledge" to show that an object becomes a "node within a network" of meanings. In "The Archaeology of Knowledge", Foucault's example is a book's function as a node within a network meanings. The book does not exist as an individual object, but exists as part of a structure of knowledge that is "a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences." In the critique of power–knowledge, Foucault identified Neo-liberalism as a discourse of political economy which is conceptually related to governmentality, the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, techniques) with which people are governed.


title: Discourse

text: Interdiscourse studies the external semantic relations among discourses, because a discourse exists in relation to other discourses, e.g. books of history; thus do academic researchers debate and determine “What is a discourse?” and “What is not a discourse?” in accordance with the denotations and connotations (meanings) used in their academic disciplines.


title: Discourse

text: In discourse analysis, "discourse" is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. In this sense, the term is studied in corpus linguistics, the study of language expressed in "corpora" (samples) of "real world" text.


title: Discourse

text: Moreover, because a discourse is a body of text meant to communicate specific data, information, and knowledge, there exist internal relations in the content of a given discourse, as well as external relations among discourses. As such, a discourse does not exist "per se" (in itself), but is related to other discourses, by way of inter-discursive practices.


title: Discourse

text: In Francois Rastier's approach to semantics, "discourse" is understood as meaning the totality of codified language (i.e., vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc. In this sense, along with that of Foucault's in the previous section, the analysis of a "discourse" examines and determines the connections among language and structure and agency.


title: Discourse

text: In formal semantics and pragmatics, discourse is often viewed as the process of refining the information in a common ground. In some theories of semantics such as discourse representation theory, sentences' denotations themselves are equated with functions which update a common ground.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: Clannad is a Japanese visual novel developed by Key and released on April 28, 2004 for Windows. While both of Key's first two previous works, "Kanon" and "Air", had been released first as adult games and then censored for the younger market, "Clannad" was specifically made for all ages. It was later ported to the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch consoles. An English version for Windows was released on Steam by Sekai Project in 2015.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: The story follows the life of Tomoya Okazaki, from adolescence to adulthood. As an average high school student, he meets many people in his last year at school, including five girls whose individual problems he helps resolve, and his life is further detailed after graduating from high school. The gameplay of "Clannad" follows a plot that branches into different scenarios based on various courses of interaction by the player character. The game was ranked as the best-selling PC game sold in Japan for the time of its release, and charted in the national top 50 several more times afterwards. Key went on to produce an adult spin-off titled "" in November 2005, which expanded on the scenario of Tomoyo Sakagami, one of the five heroines from "Clannad".


title: Clannad (video game)

text: "Clannad" has made several transitions to other media. There have been four manga adaptations published by ASCII Media Works, Flex Comix, Fujimi Shobo and Jive. Comic anthologies, light novels and art books have also been published, as have audio dramas and several albums of music. An animated film adaptation by Toei Animation was released in September 2007, followed by two anime television series including two original video animation (OVA) episodes by Kyoto Animation produced between 2007 and 2009. Both anime series and their accompanying OVAs are licensed by Sentai Filmworks and were released in North America in 2009. The animated adaptations have received high sales figures in Japan as well as critical acclaim abroad.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: "Clannad" is a drama and romance visual novel in which the player assumes the role of Tomoya Okazaki. Much of its gameplay is spent on reading the story's narrative and dialogue. "Clannad" follows a branching plot line with multiple endings; depending on the decisions that the player makes during the game, the plot will progress in a specific direction.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: There are six main plot lines that the player will have the chance to experience, five which are initially available. Throughout gameplay, the player is given multiple options to choose from, and text progression pauses at these points until a choice is made. To view all plot lines in their entirety, the player must replay the game multiple times and make different choices to change the plot progression.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: When first playing the game, the scenarios for all five heroines and additional smaller scenarios are available in what is called the School Life story arc. When the player completes a character's scenario, he or she receives an orb of light. When eight of these lights are obtained, the game's second story arc, called After Story, is made available. One of the lights disappears during School Life, but reappears in After Story. To view the true ending of "Clannad", all 13 lights must be obtained. Originally, the lights were meant to be items that players could use in the game, but since this increased the game's complexity, and detracted from the storyline, the function of the lights was simplified and made less intrusive.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: The first half of the story takes place primarily at Hikarizaka Private High School, a fictional school located in Japan. Outside of the school, frequented locations include the bakery run by Nagisa's parents, and the dormitory where Youhei Sunohara lives. Throughout the story, glimpses into an Illusionary World are shown. This world is devoid of all life except for a young girl, though she later makes a body out of junk pieces through which the player can interact with her. The remaining half of the story takes place in the same city, after the conclusion of the first half. While the town's name was never directly mentioned, one can infer that the town's name is Hikarizaka based on the many companies and establishments that share this name.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: There are recurring themes that appear throughout the story. The main theme is the value of having a family, as the title of the series implies because the main scenario writer Jun Maeda mistakenly thought the name of the Irish band Clannad meant "clan" or "family" in Irish, which is just "clann". Of the six main characters, Tomoya, Nagisa, and Kotomi have no siblings, though their parents are major factors in their stories. Nagisa's story was written to incorporate what Maeda described as a "perfect family" with a focus on mental consciousness. In Nagisa's story, there is a recurring appearance of (a fictional group mascot for children) that Nagisa is fond of. Tomoya's and Nagisa's characters were written in a style to exemplify a "growth to adulthood" by the end of the story. Fuko's and Kyou's stories have their sisters playing an integral part, and Tomoyo's story is influenced by her entire family. A minor motif of Irish words continues with the opening theme of the game, "Mag Mell", which means roughly "plain of joy" and is connected with Irish mythology. The arrange album, a short music CD that contained remixed versions of songs in the game, that was bundled with the original game release was titled "Mabinogi", which was a collection of prose stories from medieval Welsh manuscripts.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: The player assumes the role of Tomoya Okazaki, the protagonist of "Clannad". Tomoya has been labeled a delinquent; at the beginning of the story, he even expresses hatred toward the city he has lived in all his life where "Clannad" is set. He is very straightforward in his comments to others and will not hesitate to speak his mind, even if he comes off as rude during such times. Despite this, Tomoya is loyal to his friends, and has been known to dedicate himself for those around him in need of help or support. He generally has a selfless personality and does not ask much from others in return for what he does for them.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: Tomoya meets Nagisa Furukawa, the main heroine of "Clannad", at the onset of the story. Nagisa is a shy, lonely girl who has an illness which causes her to rely on those around her for support. Bullied by her schoolmates, she lacks the courage to make new friends. She has developed the strange habit of muttering the names of favorite foods that she plans to eat as a way to motivate herself, such as anpan. Kyou Fujibayashi, another of "Clannad" heroines, is an aggressive girl well known as a good cook among her friends and family. When angered, she does not hesitate to throw a dictionary at people that she often carries around for such purposes. Despite this attitude, she also has a more subdued side, especially towards her younger fraternal twin sister Ryou Fujibayashi.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: Tomoya meets a genius girl named Kotomi Ichinose, one day in the school library. She is ranked in the top 10 throughout the whole country in standardized exam results of every subject—she always goes to library to read extra materials, especially books in foreign languages. Kotomi is a tacit girl with poor social skills and it is quite difficult to communicate with her; Kotomi can even completely ignore someone when reading, even if they make loud disturbances around her. "Clannad" fourth heroine is a second-year student named Tomoyo Sakagami who transfers into Tomoya's school. Tomoyo is known to be a strong fighter, preferring to use kicking over punching, and is athletic. Although Tomoya is older than her, Tomoyo does not show him respect as a senior student. Tomoyo appears in Key's fifth game, "", as the main heroine.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: The last heroine in "Clannad" is a first-year student named Fuko Ibuki who is hyperactive and childish, before she met Tomoya, was generally seen alone by herself making wood carvings of starfish with a small knife to give to others as presents. Fuko is extremely enthralled by starfish, or things that are star-shaped, and will often go into short euphoric bouts where her awareness of her surroundings is completely overtaken.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: "Clannad" story revolves around Tomoya Okazaki, a third year high school student who dislikes his life. Tomoya's mother (Atsuko) died when Tomoya was young, leaving his father (Naoyuki) to raise him. After the accident, Tomoya's father turned to alcohol and gambling, and had frequent fights with his son. One day, Naoyuki, while arguing with his son, slammed Tomoya against the window, dislocating Tomoya's shoulder. This injury prevents Tomoya from playing on the basketball team, and causes him to distance himself from others. Ever since then, his father has treated Tomoya nicely, but distantly, as if Tomoya and he were strangers rather than a family. This hurts Tomoya more than his previous relationship with his father, and the awkwardness of returning home leads Tomoya constantly to stay out all night. Thus his delinquent life begins. Tomoya's good friend Youhei Sunohara, who was thrown out of the soccer club over a dispute with his seniors, is also a delinquent and often hangs out in his dorm room with Tomoya doing nothing much.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: The story opens on Monday April 14, 2003 at the beginning of the school year, when Tomoya meets Nagisa Furukawa, a strange girl who is one year older than he is but is repeating her last year in high school due to being sick much of the previous year. Her goal is to join the drama club which she was unable to do due to her sickness, but they find that the drama club was disbanded after the few remaining members graduated. Since Tomoya has a lot of time to kill, he helps Nagisa in reforming the drama club. During this period, Tomoya meets and hangs out with several other girls whom he gets to know well and help with their individual problems.


title: Clannad (video game)

text: In the second part of the story, which starts immediately after the end of the first part but extends into the next seven years, Tomoya and Nagisa start living together, and eventually get married. Tomoya has to endure several hardships that the family has been suffering from, especially Nagisa's illness. Just after Nagisa gives birth to their daughter Ushio, she dies, which causes Tomoya to become severely depressed. He is barely able to function, let alone look after an infant. As a result, Nagisa's parents, Akio and Sanae, take care of their granddaughter. Five years later, Tomoya meets with Shino Okazaki, his paternal grandmother. Shino tells Tomoya of his father's traumatic past, which is eerily similar to Tomoya's current situation. Afterwards, Tomoya resolves to raise Ushio and acknowledges Naoyuki as his father. Shortly after Tomoya overcomes his depression, Ushio is stricken with the same disease that Nagisa had. Tomoya, Sanae and Akio struggle to save her—Tomoya even quits his job—but all of their efforts turn out to be in vain. In the coming winter, wanting to do anything for his daughter, Tomoya takes her on a trip, but she dies shortly after.