British dark rock band Placebo has not been making much of a splash with its music for quite some time now. A recent performance in Turin, however, brought them right back to the top of the headlines. In between songs, singer Brian Molko called Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni „a piece of shit, a fascist, a racist“. [1] At almost the same time as Molko‘s tirade, an Egyptian musicians‘ union spoke out against allowing Travis Scott to perform, after some of Scott‘s fans had waved the rainbow flag at previous gigs. [2] In Malaysia, on the other hand, The 1975 were banned from performing for life after frontman Matt Healy kissed his bassist Ross MacDonald on the mouth on stage during the Good Vibes festival, commenting on the country‘s restrictive gay policies with an expletive-laden rant. [3]
The wealth„woke“ artists of the 21st century are only marginally more active when it comes to the social discourse than those of the supposedly completely apathetic 80s. „Our most striking finding was that most music is not political at all,“ Zahra Azzaoui describes for the site medium the results of a study on the political dimension of popular music, „Only about 5% of all the songs we analyzed contained any specific political references in their lyrics, and even fewer had an overall message that was political (about 3 in 100).“ The reasoning, on the other hand, is quite obvious to the author: At the end of the day, “the recording industry is a business.“ [4]
