Roger Waters, the renowned musician and activist, co-founder of the group Pink Floyd and its creative engine from 1968 to 1984, is currently on tour with his concert and multimedia installation This is not a drill through North America. At least a million people are expected to attend the performances.
The tour, which stops in Detroit on July 23, uses Waters’ extensive artistic catalog to condemn the cruelty of the ruling elite in the United States and around the world. Virtually all the songs address pressing issues of our time: imperialist war, fascism, the poison of nationalism, the plight of refugees, victims of state oppression, global poverty, social inequality, the attack on democratic rights and the danger of nuclear annihilation. .
Such an unusual and important event demands special consideration, especially since it raises to a high and compelling level, in the real experience of a large number of people, the question of the problem between art and politics in a period of unprecedented crisis. .
The concert in Detroit was a remarkable musical, visual and intellectual experience. This is not a drill it incorporates many of the memorable songs from Pink Floyd’s catalog while Waters was still at the helm, but it never becomes a nostalgia tour. Waters, in fact, doesn’t want anyone to “forget about his problems for a while.” His main concern throughout the evening was to ensure that the songs corresponded to the current social and political events.
A lesser-known song from Waters’ solo effort, “The Powers That Be” (1987), is played thunderously against images of police shootings and military bombings. The images culminate in a verbatim memorial to nearly two dozen victims of police violence in the US and other countries. The angry protests of the audience increased with each death announcement.
In the sizzling 1992 anti-war song “The Bravery of Being Out of Range,” Waters incorporates images of every US president since Ronald Reagan with descriptions of their murderous foreign policies and superimposes the words “War Criminal” on each. As for Joe Biden, Waters notes that he is “just getting started.” In the song’s crescendo, which has the memorable refrain “Old man, who you gonna kill next?”, a sudden red audio-visual explosion engulfs the audience, intended to provide a glimpse of what it must be like to be shot. . by a drone or military aircraft.
At the end of the 1972 nightmarish song “Run Like Hell”, the animated images transform into video footage of a US military helicopter firing missiles at a residential neighborhood. The text explains that these were real images of 10 civilians and journalists killed in Iraq in 2007. It adds that the video was “courageously leaked by Chelsea Manning” and “courageously published by Julian Assange.” The installation is then adorned with the words “Free Julian Assange” and “Lock Up The Killers,” drawing some of the loudest cheers of the night.
The performance ends on a richly crafted, haunting high note. Waters’ band performs a medley of songs from the legendary 1972 for the first time dark side of the moon album: “Us and Them”, “Any Color You Like” and “Brain Damage”. The ever-growing chorus of each is set to gradually multiply images, eventually hundreds of them, of people from all over the world. These are portraits of a wide range of human beings: teenage war victims, industrial workers, mothers, sick children, the homeless. It’s a unifying, human imagery, culminating in a giant panorama at the end of “Brain Damage.” It’s a reminder from Waters of how much there is to lose in the world.
This medley is immediately followed by the lesser-known but powerful “Two Suns in the Sunset” (1983). Waters introduces the song with references to the current dangers of nuclear war, clearly pointing to the US/NATO instigated war against Russia in Ukraine involving the world’s largest nuclear-armed powers. The brightly animated opening pastoral images of an individual driving through the countryside change character terrifyingly. We realize that the “glow” emanates from the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, which incinerates large masses of people in the images.
The conventional wisdom, fueled by countless literary and music magazines, taught in every art and theater college, says that art and politics, like oil and water, are best left unmixed. Various warning examples of the past are regularly produced to intimidate young artists, to instill in them the madness of social commitment. Even more generally, the prevailing notion is that the aesthetic element is a thing that exists in itself, a value that has little or nothing to do with the lives and concerns of the great masses of people, as if the artist that creates an aesthetic, the form and the public that enjoys it are empty machines, one to create the form and the other to appreciate it.
If the artist, says the official version, has strong views, he is better off keeping them to himself. And many artists and musicians, sadly, live up to these notions. But Waters is not one of them. The entire concert tour is a deliberate and conscious refutation of such ideas. An opening message in the multimedia installation explains this: “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics,’ you’d do well to fuck off at the bar right now.” How appropriate and eloquent! Indeed, how could art in our time of unprecedented turmoil and suffering be meaningful if it did not possess the element of protest? What would you be telling your audience? The artist who accepts the false dichotomy between art and politics, who knows his “right place,” will end up meaning little to anyone and certainly won’t last.
The powers that be recognize the danger. Though This is not a drill has received favorable news coverage, there is a conspicuous lack of reporting about it in the mainstream press. Waters recently sued the Toronto media after they refused to provide meaningful coverage of her two-night performance in that city. Critics prefer her music without the angry disgust.
The decision to ignore Waters’ actions in Toronto has to be related to his opposition to the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. The musician has taken a principled position on the conflict. While he strongly opposed the reactionary Russian invasion, Waters commented that “a prolonged insurgency in Ukraine would be excellent for gangster hawks in Washington. It’s what they dream of.”
It’s impossible not to be moved by Waters’s socially engaged and historically informed musical interpretation, by the fusion of serious artwork and incisive political analysis. Waters is not presenting a systematically developed political perspective, much less the program of a particular tendency. What he finds expression in This is not a drill It is a deep indignation against injustice, against war, against hypocrisy and official lies.
The 78-year-old Waters, who possesses the energy and spirit of someone half his age, isn’t on a nostalgia tour. Other artists his age continue to tour and play his old hits, presumably making a living. The vast majority of them, particularly those whose art was rooted in the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, lost their anger decades ago. They made their social and artistic peace with society. They have to keep presenting their original material because they don’t have anything new and important to say. Worst of all, they may even have a Kennedy Center Honor, that “broad rainbow ribbon” of shame that American presidents whose hands are soaked in blood hang around their necks.
Aguas, on the other hand, is not a “legend”, that is, a relic. He remains a living, hard-working and thinking artist. He’s still committed, he’s still pushing forward. His work is a serious artist’s response to the conditions of his time.
The three-hour performance was a tour de force, involving the participation of master musicians. Waters demonstrates in practice at every performance on this tour the truth of Leon Trotsky’s proposition that “a protest against reality…is always part of a truly creative work,” and that every new trend in art, and such a concert-installation should be considered a “new trend”: “it has started with the rebellion.”
Waters is a serious artist and therefore resolutely honest, bold in his conceptions of the world. His amazing art and his opposition to the existing social system are intertwined, they feed off each other. It is not about an artificial “leftism”, grafted onto an artificial and superficial “radicalism” that is careful not to go beyond the accepted limits. Waters absorbed the “rebellion” into his bone and marrow long ago, and continues to live and breathe it. He inspires the audience to think critically, to feel outrage against what exists and to believe that a new and better world can and must be born.