Throbbing bass and dim lighting form a backdrop for the waves of humanity crashing into each other in the space at the foot of the stage. An ocean eroding a beach, the small crowd sings along. The call\/response format as the lead singer proffered the mic to the audience\u2026reminds me of a southern spiritual, or of the crowd chanting with religious ecstasy \u201cno justice, no peace\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a marked similarity between the crowd at a show and the crowd at a protest, and in the ephemera produced: matching signs, matching tee shirts. Functionally too, I’d argue that there’s a common thread in the ways and reasons why the events are planned and produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No hand lettered signs with pithy slogans are present here of course, but at the front of the room is a merch table where attendees can purchase records and clothing which both signal that the purchaser was there and bear a quasi political statement. And in the room with the stage\u2013quiet for a moment while the crowd streams outside to suck nicotine or cool air into their lungs and await the headliners, leaving behind a few stragglers and strewn remnants of refuse\u2013the sea of black clad raises arms and excited faces surges back to meet the barricades that might as well have been the police barricades girding the edges of the street a few months previously at the tail end of the pride parade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not really a merch person. I always say I’d like to be, that I like the idea of giving cash directly to performers and bypassing the middleman, but I really don’t like wearing tee shirts with slogans on them. It’s a little too slavishly fanboy for me, transforming the performer audience relationship from a collaboration into a one way conduit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I recall feeling much the same way as a teenager at one of the first direct action street movement I took part in, seeing United For Peace and Justice handing out professionally printed signs for demonstrators to carry; uniform signs with pre-printed slogans, perhaps market tested in some way, created by an umbrella organization bothered me as much as the slogans on the signs themselves: neutered, generic language that would refrain from offending all of the leaders of each component organization. It was an anti-war demonstration following closely on the heels of the US invasion of Afghanistan as the inevitable spread of a crusade in the name of \u2018terror\u2019 was becoming obvious and the crowd peppered with handmade banners speaking of \u2018no blood for oil\u2019, but the neat, tidy posters created by UFPJ carefully avoided all language referring to corporate greed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Logo tee shirts have always felt similarly sterile to me, even those with quasi political slogans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The one band hoodie I have wasn’t a purchase; I borrowed it from an ex lover to whom I never returned it. And like a placard gleaned from the detritus scattered on the ground at the end of an early 00s anti-war demonstration, it bears a political slogan. The abolitionist sentiment memorialized in white screenprint on black cotton fleece happens to be one I agree with, but\u2013probably at least in part because I didn’t select the font, arrangement, or playful tone of the phrase \u2018smoke pigs, actualize it\u2019 encircling an image of the ever popular ak47\u2013I hardly ever wear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then again, maybe that’s just a fashion choice; I hardly ever wear pullover hoodies at all. And somehow shouting along with Michael Berdan tonight doesn’t give me the same feeling of being a docile ruminant on the way to the slaughterhouse, though it probably should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shouting predetermined slogans (\u201csay her name\u201d) is more exhilarating than depressing too, now that I think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s probably both content and context. Still, is one actually exerting pressure on society in the latter case, or \u201cbuilding community\u201d at the club? Or are these just things we like to tell ourselves when what we’re really doing is, honestly, having fun and subconsciously serving as the very same controlled opposition we fear?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Community matters, of course, for everyone. And especially for those of us whose gender or race or class or sexuality paints a target on our back. But ultimately we need more than just community. We need empathy for those who lie outside our circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After all, iconic revolutionaries like Che Guevara (printed on a tee shirt available for $19.99 at Amazon near you\u2026) were children of the wealthy elite willing to put it all on the line for equality. And when I looked around at the faces shouting the names of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, many of them likely have never run the same sort of added risk of police violence as those whose violent ends we’re currently protesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I brought a friend to a metal show once, a person who I’d also marched side by side with at a protest in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and attended Pride with. We jumped around half naked and sweaty the same way we’d danced at Spectrum across Brooklyn the week before, but as we were leaving they turned to me and said it was fun, \u201cbut what are those white boys who probably grew up in Connecticut so angry about?\u201d. If I hadn’t been half drunk, and had the time to really think about an answer, I probably would have said something about how it doesn’t matter. How one can be angry about the material conditions altering someone else’s life even if they don’t alter one’s own. And how we need the Che Guevaras and the Karl Marxs (and this week, the Luigi Mangiones) to take part in the revolution as much as we need the workers and people of color to join hands and rise up against all kinds of oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I’d probably also have said something about how art sometimes is just good fun. Sometimes it absolutely means something, and sometimes it can be used in service of political ends and trigger the same violent ire (and even protest, just ask David Wojnarowicz) as political movements, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes it just provides a safe space to dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the moment, at least, I’m going to believe that when the cops show up to crack skulls on college campuses it’s because the anti-imperialist message actually strikes fear into the heart of the powers that be, and not because someone in an office decided letting the people blow off a little steam now will delay the guillotine another few decades. And if crowdsurfing is just yuppie-corporate trust falls in another font\u2026well it’s one I happen to like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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