Active music over activism

Active music over activism

The culture of boycott is where the Right and Left imagine to be on opposite sides, but are not
On Wednesday, British rock band Radiohead played a gig in Tel Aviv, Israel. A band plays a gig and that's not news. But this was different. The Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a global campaign attempting to increase economic and political pressure on Israel to ‘end the occupation of Palestinian lands’, urged Radiohead to call off the concert (संगीत कार्यक्रम). But the band refused. This became a raging (उग्र/तीव्र) controversy, with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and filmmaker Ken Loach, among others, leading the charge against Thom Yorke, Radiohead's frontman, described by an Israeli paper as “a sour pickle with a beautiful voice”.
Losing My Religion
Others, like REM's Michael Stipe, supported Yorke, “Let’s hope a dialogue continues, helping to bring the occupation to an end and lead to a peaceful solution.“ Arab-Israeli singer Nasreen Qadri, who opened for Radiohead, wrote, “This approach is hurting me. I am a Muslim Arab woman. I am a singer. I was born in Haifa and grew up in Lod -two cities with a mix of Arab and Jewish communities, living side by side. It wasn’t always easy, but my personal experience has taught me that open dialogue is the only way to overcome (काबू करना) our differences.” The usually reticent Yorke exploded in a Rolling Stone interview, attacking the pro-Palestine protesters who’d been waving flags at his gigs in Scotland, [Radiohead guitarist] Jonny [Greenwood] has both Palestinian and Israeli friends and a wife who’s an Arab Jew. All these people to stand there at a distance throwing stuff at us, waving flags, saying, ‘You don't know anything about it!’ Imagine how offensive that is for Jonny. And imagine how upsetting that it's been to have this out there. Just to assume that we know nothing about this. Just to throw the word ‘apartheid (रंगभेद)’ around and think that’s enough. It’s such an extraordinary waste of energy . Energy that could be used in a more positive way.
As it happened, in Tel Aviv, Radiohead played its longest gig in 11years, with two encores (दोहराना/ दुहराव). The Times of Israel reports that when they played ‘No Surprises’ and sang, ‘Bring down the government, they don't, they don't speak for us’, “an unprompted cheer of approval swept through the crowd. It seemed that many of the 50,000 creeps and weirdos (मौजी आदमी) in attendance were not Likud [Israel's right wing party] voters.” What this proves is that books, music and ideas always travel. British pop duo Wham! went to communist China. The Beatles never went to the Soviet Union but their music was a huge influence, managing to penetrate the Iron Curtain and sow the seeds of rebellion. As Yorke argued, the people of a country should not be confused with their government’s policies, “Playing in a country is not endorsing its government.”
The culture of boycott (बहिष्कार करना) is one issue where the Right and the Left overlap. They imagine they are on different sides of the divide, but in reality they are not. The BJP says don’t play cricket with Pakistan and ban Pakistani actors in Bollywood, because Pakistan is a terror State. The BDS movement spanks (थप्पड़ मारना) Yorke, saying you should not play in Israel because Israel sponsors terror. I don’t see the difference. The other aspect of this debate is the ‘intellectual’ culture we live in, which prides moral indignation (आक्रोश) more than reasoning. There are a million causes in the world. People have a right to fight for these causes. But they have no right to pass patronising (संरक्षण देने का प्रदर्शन करने वाला) judgement on those who believe in doing things differently. Activism reduces a creative genius’ aesthetic output to nothing. Morality triumphs culture.
Karma Police Tom Wolfe has spoken scathingly (गंभीर रूप से आलोचनात्मक) about celebrities taking on causes. In a commencement address he delivered at Boston University in 2000, he argued that this was a 20th-century phenomenon, where an artist can achieve tremendous eminence by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. This elevates the celebrity to a higher plane from where she can look down on ordinary people and fellow artists.
In a biting passage, which deserves to be quoted in its entirety, Wolfe writes, “One of the things that I find really makes it worth watching all the Academy Awards, all the Emmys, all those awards ceremonies, is to see how today's actors and television per formers have discovered the formula. If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of ‘intellectual’. No mental activity is required. It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan's dictum that ‘moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity”.
In going ahead with his decision to play in Israel, Yorke blew his chances of becoming a phoney (जाली/नक़ली) intellectual. But he's emerged stronger as a consummate artist who believes in the healing power of music. As he said at one point in his Tel Aviv gig, ‘A lot of stuff was said about this. In the end, we played some music.’ That’s exactly what Radiohead did.