I was in the audience when Radiohead’s Thom Yorke called a heckler a coward. This episode got me thinking about freedom and protest – and how not to go about it.
It’s rare for a journalist to be an incidental witness to a newsworthy event. But it happened to me last week at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne when a heckler disrupted a performance by English musician Thom Yorke.
Yorke walked off for about a minute while the crowd chanted for him to come back; he returned and played. The first verse goes: “Arrest this man/He talks in maths/He buzzes like a fridge/He’s like a detuned radio …” Indecipherable, ineffective and compromised by the commercial transaction, the heckler ticked just about every box for how not to stage a public protest. Most of the 11,000 audience would have been onside with his politics. There are questions about Yorke’s “support” of Israel by not joining a cultural boycott: he performed inhis bandmate Jonny Greenwood has played there, and his wife is Israeli. It is worth debating the artist’s responsibilities to speak out against war crimes.
We are about to enter an escalated period of protest; registered protests in NSW have increased fourfold in four years. The dumber a protest is, the less its prospects of bringing about change or even laying down a membrane of awareness. What’s dumb protest? Abstaining from voting in an election. Voting against progress because it doesn’t go far enough. Jumping the shark and wearing a black T-shirt to cheer on a criminal-led trade union.
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