This is how Paul Weller addressed the public in Glasgow, after dedicating a song «to all the tens of thousands of women, children, newborns, men, civilians in Palestine and Gaza»: «I want to ask you a question. It’s really simple, no gray areas. Are you for genocide or are you against it? It’s a fucking yes or no question…”.
Weller is the promoter, on December 13th in London at the O2 – we prefer to call it Brixton Academy – of Gig for Gaza, a charity concert in support of the victims of the Palestinian “humanitarian crisis”. The money raised will go to support the two organizations Map (Medical aid for Gaza) and Gaza Forever, both committed to tackling the systemic horror that has been spreading in the region since October 7th last year. “This is an opportunity to enjoy a night of powerful music and make a tangible difference in the lives of people facing unimaginable hardships,” the statement read. The evening will include speeches and screenings of short films and videos.
AT THE MOMENT the main names are those of the London modfather Weller (Jam, Style Council), the Scottish indie-veterans Primal Scream and the Northern Irish rappers Kneecap. Others will be added in the coming weeks. The graphics of the promotional and scenographic material are due to Robert «3D» Del Naja of Massive Attack. The line-up is curated by Weller himself, an old socialist who has been active since the 1980s, when with the other British political singer-songwriter par excellence, Billy Bragg, he formed the anti-Thatcher Red Wedge committee. Both he and Primal Scream have respectively just released a new album (66 – like his age – for Weller and Come Ahead for Primal Scream). Always troubled, the relationship between pop-rock stardom and politics is more than ever in full swing for/against. In an era in which we remember the Egyptians, cloying hypocrisies of operations like Band Aid and We Are The World (the most unintentionally imperialist title to grace a pop song) the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare returns to act as a painful and revealing watershed. At the moment, the pro-Palestine artists are, in addition to the aforementioned, the fumigant Roger Waters (his skirmishes with David Gilmour and his wife are well known); Brian Eno (who with the indie singer Nadine Shah and the actress Maxine Peake organized a similar evening at the Union Chapel in London last April), and Massive Attack (who in December, with the Scottish alternate-hip-hop trio Young Fathers , published a ceasefire 33 in support of Médecins Sans Frontières).
Nor does the front of silence on Gaza lack illustrious names: aligned with Israel are Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, both regularly on tour in Tel Aviv and critical of the boycott of the country promoted by the Bds (Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions) movement. Like Nick Cave himself, who lately loves to pose as a liberal-libertarian and has had an acidic exchange with Eno and Waters on the BDS issue.
