SOFTPLAYS MORAL DILEMMA – WE’RE HERE TO PLAY, BUT SHOULD WE BE?
Soft Play (Kayleigh Nickson/Northern Exposure)
Softplay’s decision to go ahead with their Benicàssim set despite the festival’s ties to an Israel-linked investment fund lands them in that age-old mess artists face: do you step away on principle, or stay on stage and try to make noise from inside the system?
SOFTPLAYS STATEMENT
We are receiving a lot of questions about our performance this weekend at Benicassim. It is important to us and our fans that we share our stance and that is; we are going to play. The investment fund kr, the company in question with ties to Israel, bought a major stake in superstruct, who are a group that own a huge number of major festivals. This includes FiB. Festivals belonging to superstruct are independently run and they themselves have no control over these ties or who indeed buys the umbrella company. Our concern is that if we start boycotting every festival with ties to these kind of companies, we will deplatform ourselves and not have a stage to shout about the Palestinian people on. It is also important to say at this point these festivals are also the main way a band like ours makes a living to support ourselves and our families. Without them our band couldn’t operate. It’s a very tricky situation but currently we believe getting out there and spreading our continued dismay at the genocide being commited by Israel and our solidarity with the Palestinian people is ultimately going to do more than cancelling our performance and sitting at home. We have asked FiB to directly address the conversation with us too as we want to know their personal stance. However, in reply they sent a blanket superstruct statement. It is not ideal and we would like them to make their personal stance clearer. They should be doing more.
The band’s reasoning holds a certain weight. Boycotting festivals with indirect ties to unethical entities could backfire especially when those entities have embedded themselves so deeply into the fabric of the industry that absence feels more like self-erasure than protest. They can claim that their parent company, Superstruct, is in an enormously big umbrella corporation. The individual festivals almost always are autonomous, which provides believable remove but not insulation from shady finances. The band’s decision to perform, even though still in solidarity for Palestine, is framed as a refusal not to be censored in an tainted venue.
Compliance and criticism are in balance alongside their tone. The recognition of KR’s Israeli affiliations and demands for FiB to stand personally against them are acts of good faith the claim that boycotts would “deplatform” them begins to frame abstention as sacrifice and not political belief. There is a natural defense for complicity in the pragmatics for survivability, we must perform in order to speak, and we must speak in order to survive. The statement isn’t going to choke or quiet down the controversy, it’s in the controversy. There’s integrity in owning the cost-of-business realities of touring, particularly for bands not buffered by major label largesse or inheritances. However, the seriousness of the subject, genocide, profiteering, systemic racism requires something more than discomfort. It requires moral authority, even when that makes things messy. And the band’s effort to bind together outrage and pragmatism is an indication of just how dirty the water is.
Eventually, it’s not whether their decision is right or wrong, it’s whether the message that is being represented from the podium is sharp enough to pierce through the compromise. If we are going to be playing music, then what we are singing must be able to pierce through. If not, rallying is just another lyric on the playlist.
