Culture Is Not Your Friend
Way back when, I was considerably wowed by the shock and awe of the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They possessed, like no other, a certain quantity of mystagogic power over my impressionable young mind. Loud instrumental post-rock that was also somehow Jewish folk music? Yes please. Iconoclast Anti-American destroyers of hegemonic fantasy? Hell yes. Kabbalistic cyphers? oh my god. My Christian upbringing could not have better prepared me for such track titles as Redeemer=Motherfucker. At the dawn of the second Iraq war, in the dingy hallway of the art department at the small Christian liberal arts college that I attended, my friend John Kelly described to me in hushed tones, how the liner notes to Godspeed’s new album Yanqui U.X.O. (2002) held a diagram showing how entertainment corporations were financially linked to the military industrial complex. This really smoked my mind. But the equation pop music=mechanized death, was a factoid that I was not so well prepared for. Can any one ever be?
Earlier this year Godspeed You! Black Emperor removed their catalogue from Spotify, then from Tidal, Apple Music and Amazon Music. They offered no explanation, but they join a growing number of bands who are rather more vocal about why they are withdrawing: in regards Spotify in particular, these bands are protesting the fact that billionaire CEO Daniel Ek, has used his investment fund Prima Materia to lead in investing $694 million dollars in Helsing (of which Ek is a chairman), a new weapons manufacturing company, based in Germany, whose principle product is AI assisted warfare, and in particular a new AI piloted military drone called the HX-2.
If that name sounds like the name of a droid from Star Wars, or a new Mazda model, there is a reason for that: culture, like money, is fungible. That is, it is difficult to make a hard and fast line between on the one hand, the culture consumed by our children, and on the other, the spectacle and profit of war. This in effect makes all money blood-money, and all culture a culture of death, totally inseparable from, as Frederick Jameson noted, the blood, torture, death and terror that underwrites it. At the height of the war in Gaza 600 children per day were being murdered. How can we avoid our own complicity in this? In an era where the US military is actively occupying US cities, our complicity is coming home to roost.
