In the wake of the war in Gaza and Israel's genocidal policies, multiple demonstrations have erupted across the globe, with dozens and dozens of artists taking positions. It seems that practicing a more or less popular art—such as music—is a form of social change. mainstream– forces artists to express their opinions on a particular war, or even judges the way they refer to it, as if the use or lack thereof of the word 'genocide', in this case, were enough to determine where the line should be drawn between good and evil.
Whether what's happening in Gaza is genocide or not is a matter for international authorities—the UN, above all, and the International Criminal Court—and not for some singer who lives in a mansion in Florida, for example. Although it seems that going out and waving the Palestinian flag is all that's needed to let everyone know you're a good person, highly conscientious, or morally acceptable. It doesn't make any sense, or it's merely propaganda-like, and in my opinion, it doesn't serve to assess anyone's morality; it actually demonstrates the opposite: the use of a human calamity for instrumental purposes.
What value or utility is there in knowing what an international artist from Gaza thinks? And why only about Gaza, and not about Ukraine or any of the seventeen African countries currently experiencing an armed conflict? Why such an ideologically focused fixation on everything Israel does and not, for example, on what Iran or the United Arab Emirates are doing? Does silence—about Gaza—signify complicity? Quite the opposite: talking about it often signifies hypocrisy, at least if it's limited to waving flags and continuing to make millions at the expense of the good faith of his fans, who seem to no longer only demand music but also supposed political exemplarity. It's a rather nauseating shame. An exemplary approach that doesn't exist either, of course, since we don't know—and shouldn't know—what artists think about dozens of issues of general interest (immigrant reception policies, cold-blooded deportations, abortion, surrogacy, African famines, the rise of neo-right, the treatment and repression of political dissent in Russia, etc.). Why not force everyone to take a position on all these issues?
And why not assume that if they remain silent about it, it means they agree? An artist's authority on this matter—and so many others—is null: he doesn't save a single life, and it's done so from a nonexistent authority—or knowledge. Rather than worrying about what Rosalía thinks, what we should be doing is thinking about what the president of the International Criminal Court thinks about all this. Nothing changes knowing what Julio Iglesias or Madò Pereta thinks. Nothing denounces that hasn't already been denounced by the UN or every headline in the serious press. It serves above all the teachers who seek to kill an artist for non-artistic reasons, now that the desire to carve out a place in the global cognitive space has become more bitter. This is truly an immoral use of genocide. We use the dead to entertain our after-dinner conversations.
"What were you doing during the genocide in Gaza?" "Me? I was thinking about Rosalía and the position of flamenco or K-pop singers." Why is there anyone left who isn't against genocides? Being against them is one thing, but doing something actually useful to stop them is another, especially when what could be done has a personal and non-symbolic cost, like putting a little flag on an X or taking two photos on Instagram. But whatever the masses demand, eh, that's what we live on.
