Media is (not) "Just Entertainment"

Listening this week to the ever-excellent, ever-striving Peter Gabriel's new song "Put The Bucket Down", posted in his monthly lunar updates on the new album "O/i", I couldn't help but think of how well he encapsulated this moment in history, this moment in time. Between this and the prior month's song, "Been Undone", Gabriel has laid down the gauntlet against fascism, against overreach and authoritarian group-think, but also challenges those gone numb from the offenses that come blasting out one after another in the headlines: don't look away. Don't stop recording. Don't stop speaking about it. Don't stop protesting. Catch yourself becoming desensitized, and recalibrate.

With lyrics like by the Nazarene, with his curing machine, I've been undone or by the recursive slaves, in the home of the brave, though I want to observe, but it keeps touching a nerve, Gabriel is saying don't get complacent. Don't accept this evil as status quo.

The songs are fantastic, as ever from Peter Gabriel, one of the music world's greatest. Go listen to them. But what I came here to write about was the train of thought I had afterward: these lyrics do touch a nerve, and there will always be people who listen to bands like Rage Against The Machine and (hilariously) demand to know just when they decided to go political. After all, these people would say, music (or film, or paintings, or video games) are "just entertainment" and that we artists should "keep your politics to yourself."

No.

I refuse.

But that conversation is one we've all had, and I don't need to explain why Tom Morello gives two fucks about the plight of the working class or why Star Trek was always challenging racism since the earliest days of its airing. Instead, I want to explore the source of the complaint: where did these people get this wrong-headed notion that art is "just entertainment" meant for mindless consumption so that the corporate line goes up? Art that doesn't challenge you to think, or reflect, or learn? Where did they pick up this concept and why do they feel it should be the expected default social contract when they go to see a movie or buy concert tickets?

The rise of social media, of ad-sponsored "content", of corporate focus-group work-shopped media whose sole crafted purpose is to raise stock prices, offend no one, say nothing, mean nothing, change nothing, but provide a couple hours of mindless distraction, the second screen of the world–this machine tells the public that it is king and all should kneel. It reminds them not to consider possibility but be told instead what the message and plot are via wooden exposition. It places sponsor products. A statistical outlier, it asserts itself the dominant form of media and calls other forms "woke" and "snobby". It wants you, not to have good or bad taste, but to taste nothing.

This dead media (ever more dead thanks to the AI slop bubble) is the antithesis of art, and its proliferation like weeds in the garden contaminates industries like an invasive species. The garden must be weeded for the trees to bear fruit. Not just once, but constantly. Protest is not a single performance, not a one-time event. It's a way of life, to fight back: both in the streets and in the sheets of paper and screens we use every day.

I am reminded of the song Sentinels by The Midnight: I'll give you something you haven't tried, I'll sell you something you can't buy–flickers on a cave wall, flickers on a cave wall. The rejection of algorithm-programmed screen time, of social aberrations made normative through the numbing inundation of time, a call to dream and imagine what the shapes and shadows made by the fire might become.

As Peter Gabriel sings in his new song: I need more information, I need to know what's going on. And I need this information now, so I don't go wrong, I don't go wrong. How can you smile, when it's all gone? How can you wink when you know what'll come? Believing in something that doesn't exist? Letting it go, just listen and feel, listen and feel.