Music festivals and the cities that host them have long had a fractious relationship, going all the way back to the original Woodstock in 1969. Los Angeles, Miami and New York have all put the brakes on EDM-themed music events in recent years, with drugs and drug-related deaths as the main point of contention. In other cases, some festivals’ own success have been their downfall.
In mid-2016, the Indian state of Goa proposed a ban on EDM festivals that usually take place there around New Year’s, citing the huge influx of visitors that the festivals draw, overwhelming local facilities. In response, organizers of the big VH1 Supersonic and Sunburn events relocated northward to Pune, closer to Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra. When someone in India says there are too many people, it gets your attention.
Use a Synth. Go to Jail
However, the censoring of music festivals has taken on some new and disturbing wrinkles lately. In November, the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires threatened to cancel a performance in the city’s Luna Park by the classic German techno band Kraftwerk because they would theoretically be in violation of a recently passed ban on electronic music events in which synthesizers are used. This might make some sense if the Buenos Aires classical music society was in charge of running the city, but they’re not. This was the use of the synthesizer as a trope for an entire music genre, EDM, which they’re associating with behavior they’d like to avoid. It might be a civic good they were hoping for, but it could also set a dangerous precedent.
At a time when reactionary and nationalist forces are resurgent globally, the idea of using a part of something to represent the whole thing — the literary term is synecdoche for you Greek scholars out there — isn’t limited to literary exercises. Synecdoche’s entry in the dictionary offers an example with the phrase “head of cattle” used to represent an entire herd. It’s not much of a stretch to extend that to a yarmulke, a hijab or a crucifix.
Stop Making Synths
Buenos Aires’ anti-synthesizer regulation may simply be misguided. It was enacted in response to the deaths of six people and the hospitalization of others at the Time Warp EDM festival there last April. According to a Buenos Aires government representative quoted in the Argentine press, the ban was enforced against Kraftwerk because they “use synthesizers or samplers as their primary instrument.”
Cities have used the excuse of drug activity or violence in the past to crack down on EDM shows. London shut down the legendary dance cave Fabric in September after a number of overdose deaths there. In 2015, the city of Miami almost shut down the Ultra Music Festival after several incidents in previous years, including the injuries to a security guard after gatecrashers trampled the show’s perimeter fence the year before. Rather than ban future iterations of the festival, though, the city instead put the kibosh on another kind of trope, forbidding rave staples like pacifiers, glow sticks, facemasks, and other totems along with the usual concert contraband like opaque backpacks and purses. It would have been hard to get angry at that kind of diffuse synecdoche.
Das Ist Verboten!
Forbidding the use of certain musical instruments as a way to control a culture is considerably more ominous, and it isn’t that new. Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, the Mother Church of country music, prohibited performers from using drums on stage there until Jerry Reed broke the ban in 1967. When Carl Perkins’ rock ‘n’ roll classic “Blue Suede Shoes” became a hit on the pop, R&B, and country charts in 1955, he was invited to perform it on the Opry but was told to leave the drum kit on the bus. The late Buddy Harman, one of the original members of Nashville’s A-Team studio crew of the 1960s, told me in an interview years ago that, before that, on several occasions, he played a snare drum while hidden behind the curtain. Amplified guitars had followed a similar tortured path onstage there. It was part of an old guard’s efforts to protect their culture against the infidels they saw bringing in the apostasy of rockabilly and later rock ‘n’ roll to country. Their influence wasn’t very long lived — listen to country radio today, and it sounds like Led Zeppelin is a primary influence.
More contemporary music genres haven’t been immune to this kind of enforced instrumental orthodoxy either. Heavy metal and hard rock largely ghettoized the synthesizer. Queen proudly declared its aversion to them and, on the back of its album sleeves and on the liner notes to 1974’s Sheer Heart Attack, wrote “no synthesizer” was used in the making of that album.
When Van Halen made a synth line the sonic centerpiece of “Jump” in 1984, you might have thought that a big-hair version of a religious fanatic was asserting the end of the world. (The song went on to become the band’s only #1 single ever, but also turned into the artistic schism that pushed singer David Lee Roth out of the group. Not quite Henry the VIII and the Church of England, but close enough for rock ‘n’ roll.) Yet while big-hair bands of 1980s hard rock and metal continued to take a dim view of keyboards of any kind, plenty of other bands — among them Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and other head-bangers — had them in the P.A. but being played, like poor Buddy Harman had to, by someone out of sight behind the curtains.
It’s Bigger Than That
It’s funny until you also remember that that same mentality kept black performers off stages entirely in some parts of the U.S. for much of the 20th century. No one sat down and said, “Let’s build a tour route called the ‘chitlin’ circuit.” That collective name was given to performance venues throughout parts of the U.S. that were safe and acceptable for African-American entertainers to perform in during the Jim Crow era, up through the 1960s. However, for decades, it became the narrow road that thousands of black artists had to confine themselves and their audiences to.
Everything has a bright side: the Opry’s ban on drums compelled the development of percussive guitar styles, the chitlin’ circuit created an underground railroad for generations of blues musicians who formed the foundation of modern rock music, and Van Halen’s “Jump” ultimately led to Sammy Hagar joining the band. (Well, two out of three, anyway.)
Meanwhile, reports that China has banned South Korean content from its TV screens as reprisal against the Korean government’s decision last September to deploy the U.S.-made missiles there may spare us yet another round of K-Pop, the musical equivalent of Hello Kitty.
The bottom line? A major city in an advanced country banning a specific instrument because it represents an entire music genre or culture isn’t that many steps removed from the Taliban and ISIS forbidding music altogether in their realms. And in light of recent events here at home, including meetings ending with exhortations of “Heil!” accompanied by an outstretched arm salute that took place within sight of the Washington Monument two months ago, it’s worth keeping an eye on developments of that sort. It wasn’t that long ago that The New York Times and The Washington Post were both telling us that certain things could never happen here. And then they did occur.
Artistic freedom is a wonderful thing. Treasure it, protect it, defend it.
