Last night’s “Bringing Human Rights Home” show, at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, was close to five hours long. It was also, in shorthand, the “Pussy Riot show,” because two members of the collective, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova and Maria (Masha) Alekhina, were introduced by Madonna and gave short speeches in Russian, which were translated on the spot. More than anything, though, it was a membership drive for Amnesty International.
Was it worth going? My calmest reaction is that you’d be better off reading this piece by David Remnick, who spoke directly to Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, or donating money to Amnesty International and helping them in any of their “ten ways to make a difference.” The problems with the show were a small, dull riot of cognitive dissonances, logistical flops, and intellectual mirror play. Even this morning, the confusion is multiplying. In a post on their Livejournal, five anonymous members of Pussy Riot made it clear that Nadya and Masha are no longer members of the collective, and that the pair’s new project is to “protect the rights of prisoners.” The post continues, “And as you know, protection of rights is incompatible with radical political statements and provocative works of art, raises conflicting topics in modern society.” (That is what Google Translate tells me; you can also read the Creative Time report on the post.)
It’s hard to review a concert when there is direct political action at the center of the event. Simply put, I am not about to gainsay the opinions of people who have served prison time because of their physical, concrete resistance to political oppression. The members of Pussy Riot paid for the denunciation of statist intolerance with their own bodies—this is not what music does, or musicians (with very few exceptions). At a press conference before the show, Tolokonnikova and Alekhina stated very clearly that “we are not a band.” They are part of a brave and fractious crew—the Livejournal statement might be entirely neutral and accurate, and not a strike against the two freed members. As they said to Remnick, “Our goal in coming to Europe and New York is not to breathe the fresh air and enjoy ourselves. It’s to talk about the things that matter to us, to talk about political prisoners. We have seen the situation inside, and in there it is impossible to protest. So we are doing it now.” They spoke last night of the impending trial of other members of their collective, who could be jailed for up to five years, and mentioned the scores of “prisoners of conscience,” the precise term of art that Amnesty International and others use, who have not been freed from detention and are not nearly as well known as Pussy Riot. Their brief appearance ended with an attempt to make the crowd yell “Russia will be free!,” which we did, sort of. Then, at twice the volume, the arena broke into screams when an announcer introduced the pop band Imagine Dragons.
That’s as good as any place to stop the tape and try to tease out the contradictions. It would be vaguely misanthropic to not support the work of Amnesty International, so at some level, if their cause was helped by last night’s endless slog, dayenu. I’m happy to have given them sixty-five dollars. The problems with the show were more ideological than anything, and perhaps the remaining members of Pussy Riot have already summed them up. They don’t believe in charging ticket prices or planning their events—they show up, protest, and then deal with the consequences. It is hard to equate this kind of radical action with the slightly more removed work that Amnesty International does. Are postcards sent on behalf of prisoners really the equal of a water cannon loaded with blue ink, capable of downing a soldier who is beating a prisoner with a baton? That was the imagery of one unfortunate video that we saw between the bands. (There were many, many videos.) Or, as Bridget Moynahan, of “Blue Bloods,” said during her brief speech, “A thousand tweets could equal a life.” Can they? The point of a collective like Pussy Riot is that they aren’t going to wait for a formula to be tested; they will continue to act directly and without warning. Has Amnesty International made the state-supported homophobia of the Putin regime as widely known as Pussy Riot has? Could they ever?
And, as much as music itself may have inspired Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, and those who marched with SNCC, and those who refused to yield to riot police in various cities at various times and were pepper-sprayed, beaten, and arrested, music isn’t the same thing as direct political action. So the night felt unpleasantly self-congratulatory, despite the fact that Amnesty International deserve our praise and support, pending some horrible miscarriage of justice or fraud that has yet to come to light (pardon the cynical self-check—it’s been that kind of news cycle). There’s your M. C. Escher review: most of us haven’t suffered a fraction of what the members of Pussy Riot have, or what Kerry Max Cook experienced in his twenty-two years on death row, where he did not belong (if anyone does). So any organization helping Cook, as Amnesty did, is worthy of support. But the concert was almost uniformly terrible, save for a few moments of musical intensity and some individual stories. There is probably a better way to help prisoners of conscience, and it may have nothing to do with music.
There were maybe a dozen tributes to the previous human-rights concerts staged by Amnesty International, in both 1986 and 1988. We heard from Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bruce—man, did they have fun. And, apparently, Amnesty’s membership doubled after the first series of concerts. For an organization that takes no money from governments or corporations, that’s not minor. But I kept thinking of what is either a New Yorker cartoon or a Borscht Belt joke about the sidewalk musician: “I won’t pay you for the playing, but I’ll give you five bucks to stop.”
Let’s break down some logistics, and notes for the future shows:
If something is going to be five hours long, do like Wagner or Matthew Barney and let us know ahead of time. These omnibus concerts are unpredictable but not that unpredictable. A continuous five-hour experience might be rapturous—see above—but three-song sets, interspersed with Amnesty promo videos, in succession? Exhausting.
If you are manning the camera for the Jumbotron, and you insist on projecting closeups of Colbie Caillat’s butt, and then Debbie Harry’s butt, you’d better do it for the men, too, or you’re kind of missing the whole human-rights thing in general. Maybe best to skip that entire angle.
Nobody handed out a single flyer or flashed out a Twitter feed or gave us something to take home and remind us what we were there for. After five hours, we forget.
Blondie was pretty great.
Madonna redeemed her psilocybin-cane routine at the Grammys with a funny and impressive recounting of her touring in Russia while Pussy Riot were on trial. After being threatened with jail, expulsion, and a million-dollar fine, she didn’t change a second of her show, even though it “openly displayed gay behavior, whatever that means,” as she said last night. “Boo. Boo to that.”
It is more than discomfiting that Ms. Lauryn Hill was the only artist of color on the bill, aside from a few band members. Even the eighties, “Conspiracy of Hope” shows did better than that. Not O.K. (Footnote: Hill sounded remarkably strong, and the Brooklyn kid in me got all wobbly when she launched into “Ready or Not,” which is still the best repurposing of Enya ever. As she performed, she constantly, like an uncontrollable tic, gestured for her band to stop or start, or for her monitor levels to be adjusted. It became clear that she resides in a lineage of antic geniuses who can’t entirely control their thoughts on stage: Cat Power, James Brown, Mark E. Smith—they are as one with Ms. Hill. And I’d still rather watch them than The Fray or whatever Imagine Dragons is, other than the guys from your college marching band who studied Ryan Tedder anthems and never gave back the drums.)
The future is not bleak. The two women, who did not want to be named, next to me at the show were twenty and twenty-one. They spent almost all of a pretty gripping Susan Sarandon speech—“I kind of wish we’d stop killing people, too,” she dropped in, happily—taking a selfie. This then demanded the help of young men in front of them, kicking off a flirting session. And God bless flirting, especially because any grouchy feelings I had about their disconnection from the moment were allayed by several things. The two women sang along to The Fray while I counted backward from a thousand, but then leapt up to sing along with Blondie, too. (Other than Hill and Imagine Dragons, they were probably the crowd favorites.) And when Tolokonnikova and Alekhina appeared, they stopped talking and patiently filmed their entire appearance with their phones, which I saw none of the older audience members doing. (I stupidly recorded only audio.) Meaning: the future of political action will not look like 1968 or 1986 or even Pussy Riot’s church bumrush. But for it to be political, it almost certainly needs to involve the body. A brief video of Nelson Mandela stills, set to audio of his statements before being imprisoned in 1964 and super-titled, was even more succinct than Pussy Riot: “I am prepared to die.” Who else is?
Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
