They make the cause trendy, cool, fresh, novel, and in the long run desensitize you to the issue at hand with flashy lights and music, driving beats and alcohol which numbs the mind and lets you forget why you actually gathered in the stadium, bar, house in the first place. Perhaps call me cynical but the purpose of a benefit concert is to make you feel good, less envious of others who are doing more than you, self-conscious of your inability to do more than you can, and less guilty for doing less than you can and using all that you consume on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I love supporting causes and think that advocacy is a wonderful tool but the way it is operated today, the louder the issue the louder the music becomes until no one, not enough the performers, actually care about the issue at hand.
It all becomes about posturing for the last dollar, staying relevant until the last light turns off until you can no longer say that you care anymore about the victim and that you are more important. Despite their Russian origin, I see no reason to believe that they (the performers of now, past, and yet to come) care about their causes. They do but the once the heat of the moment has passed and they have been paid, what keeps them focused on the cause except another chance to use destitution for shining, spell-binding moment of public fame?
In this touchy dialectic, I am reminded of Adorno's disdain for protest music and his deeply felt animosity towards what it does to both the music and musicians, listener and sincere victim of the cause which the music and the musician exploit. Known for his lengthy writing on the culture industry and its monopolizing of our attention for its nefarious benefit. Just as relevant as it was back during its time, Adorno's thought on the anti-war movement of the 1960s and how artists like Bob Dylan and others who profess endearing and noble virtues through their music are, inevitably, doing more harm than good. As Adorno writes, popular music is not separable "from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial" (Brown, 2007). To rephrase more clearly, when music is retrofitted to become the object of amusement and pleasure-seeking, time-filling merriments, and then attempts are made to bring a 'serious' spin to something that is inherently flippant such things are bound to fail, if not implode itself and the world that surrounds it. In this way, although one may argue if they like, no matter how serious popular music may try to be it will never be able to be taken seriously. Why? Because of its very ontology, as it was designed to bring pleasure.
Perhaps his most famous writing on the topic, On Popular Music (1941), Adorno strives to express the discrepancies inherent in 'low' vs. 'highbrow' music and that, try as you might, popular music's entire thesis is about the ill-effects of "standardization" of both thought, word, and deed. Very little is left to the imagination, and what can be intimated from the uber-formalist manner by which popular music presents itself is the idea of the desensitized hive-mind who, as much as they profess individuality, cannot escape the confines of their prison mindset. Routine, regiment, rituals that are not dictated by the individual but by the monster known as society. As one anonymous Joseph writes in a commentary on the essay,
"The standards are essentially that all popular music must do something to catch the listener’s attention...The goal is to make the listener forget that everything they are hearing is pre-digested."
In short, this is what is going on when you attend or endorse a benefit concert or any type of venue where popular music, really even 'high brow' music as well, is being played in order to illicit a sense of pity, dismay, humility, despondency, the over-used term of "awareness." I find Adorno's comments on the listener especially damning in this case because most of the idea around a benefit concert is to profess one's position under the pretense of performance, where the music becomes ancillary to the more seditious desire to change your mind, make you believe something that perhaps you don't actually believe in, OR more accurately do not need to believe in. Whether or not your belief is right, it is the homogenization of belief and the submission of opposition and questioning that Adorno had found so egregious with popular music, and which I do find myself thinking about Hip-Hop.
There are two types of listeners according to Adorno, the "rhythmically obedient" and the "emotional," the former indicated by one who finds comfort (yes, comfort) in submission to the mass and finds no reason why they must stand a part in any regard. The latter is self-evident, one who leads by emotion and desire to believe in their mythological reality as long as possible, the desire to feel that. Thus, benefit concerts are not designed to do anything but instead are designed to make you feel like you are doing something, and in the process homogenize beliefs and make their audiences epistemic slaves to the dictator (performer) and by extension realpolitik. While not everyone belongs to this hardline dichotomy most of us are and are not ready to admit that we cannot truly think for ourselves.
One last concept, as mentioned in his 1968 interview on 3sat, is the Warencharakter or commodity character, referring to Commodity fetishism. Coined by Karl Marx in his work Das Kapital (1867), the connections between human beings are no longer defined by their humanity and the intimate connections between the interlocuters but by commodities each person owns and has, the societal place in which they belong, where the reflexive states of production and consumption are uplifted as the supreme beacons of life eternal with the striving for cosmopolitan respect and dignity cast aside for the attainment of wealth and fortune. Say what you will about Marx and his philosophy, when applying such thoughts to benefit concerts, and the similarities can make one shudder. The concert is the machine, and the people are but pawns in a game to which they have not woken up to, that they are being used and exploited for the sole purpose of being income-generators, cogs in the machine of the performer, venue, ticket seller, manager, and not at all for the people afflicted by the conflict they are hoping to help with their attendance to what is really a parade of affluency under the guise of humanitarianism. The worst kind imaginable I say. The entry for this term in the more intellectually created Wiki-adjacent portal called The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia, has a singular line that I hope you remember by heart,
Commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political positions they occupy.
This summarizes what benefit concerts are. They are designed to distract, gloss-over, destabilize, and ultimately dumb down those who are susceptible to the seductive beats. In effect we all are in some way, and the only anecdote to hegemonic thinking is to wake up and sense the malnutrition of the mind when starved of true knowledge. While virtuous artists may put on benefit concerts with well-intentioned mindsets, ultimately they are but capitulating to the whims of individuals far superior to them, and often invisible to the common everyday man and laymen. Be aware that rappers like FACE, Oxxxymiron, Noize MC, and many others want something in return for your fidelity to them, despite their humanitarian desire to help those under duress. Ask yourself, "What is in it for them," and how are you being utilized in order to achieve this goal? These three rappers collectively represent a bright side of Russian Hip-Hop but that does not mean they are completely self-less for none of us are. And when it comes to popular music, you must be aware of the end goal at all times. Nothing is done flippantly and sporadically, nor is it done selflessly either.
Be aware and stay aware of those pleasures which you enjoy and at all times question that which you have been mindlessly consuming and/or endorse without careful consideration. Benefits concerts are designed to make you feel as if one is absolved of their sin of luxury for having attended, performed, or donated. Yet, the underlying issue is still there and has not changed, despite the initiative to augment reality monetarily or through heightened attention to the causes in which you try to change. Don't get me wrong, I love them as much as anyone else but artists, especially Russian rappers, must be aware of the detrimental effects their so-called 'advocacy' is bringing. It not only desensitizes but 'trendifies' suffering. That, my friends, is what Adorno wants us to be aware. The trendifying of slavery, mental submission, obedience, and really in the end the annihilation of free-thought itself.
Comments