Music has always been political, so I wasn’t at all surprised by the, shall we say, expressiveness at this weekend’s Coachella festival. Nor was I surprised that the political sloganeering was aimed at denouncing the Jewish state—if you’re a band nobody’s ever heard of, and you don’t have the talent to change that with your music alone, you’ll be tempted to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon and hope it can pull you farther than you were able to go on your own.
The band itself is obviously not important, but I couldn’t help but think of how strange it is that music artists have paid so much attention to the war without acknowledging how the war started: with the biggest music festival massacre in history.
Cowardly musicians have long sought to memory-hole the Nova festival, at which Hamas murdered nearly 400 innocents on Oct. 7, 2023, and kidnapped dozens more. But it requires an extraordinary level of sliminess to use the music stage to boost the army that carried out that massacre.
The Nova festival was targeted in part because those music fans represented not just the world of the creative arts but the peace-minded music fans Hamas wanted to eradicate from the earth. Which is to say, everybody at Coachella, too.
The people who cheered loudest when a no-name band at Coachella projected “F—k Israel” onto the stage backdrop were a walking parody, essentially cheering the concept of a fanatical religious sect murdering those who might think music is capable of bringing peace or meaningful change of any kind.
A week earlier, the band Green Day used its performance to add an anti-Israel lyric to a song. Again, this is run-of-the-mill stuff—as a live music fan who is also a practicing Jew and a political conservative, getting lectured from the stage on my own political nefariousness is practically expected. But it is still pretty funny to see a band turn a peacenik pop festival into a fascist death cult pep rally.
Indeed, the Nova massacre is one of the many ways that the world’s support for Hamas against Israel has exposed the hypocrisy of the self-styled liberal humanists. At the 2018 Grammys a group of artists—Maren Morris, Eric Church, and the Brothers Osborne—performed “Tears in Heaven” and dedicated it to the victims of the Las Vegas festival shooting in October 2017 and to the victims of the suicide bombing a few months earlier at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. “The painful truth is that this year, in just those two events, 81 music lovers just like us went out to enjoy a night of music and never came back home,” Morris said from the stage. The performance was to “honor the memory of the beautiful, music-loving souls so cruelly taken from us.”
Morris & Co. were specifically chosen (or volunteered) likely because they had played at the Vegas festival that was targeted in the 2017 attack. It was a beautiful tribute.
Six years later, at the 2024 Grammys, the Nova victims were also mentioned. There were no big-name artists performing or introducing the brief segment despite the fact that the theater was full of them. It fell to Recording Academy head Harvey Mason to say that “music must always be our safe space.” The violation of that safe space “strikes at the very core of who we are,” Mason said.
He continued: “We felt that at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. We felt that at the Manchester Arena in England. We felt that at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. And on Oct. 7, we felt that again when we heard the tragic news from the Supernova Music Festival for Love that over 360 music fans lost their lives and another 40 were kidnapped.”
A concert in Paris, a show in Manchester, a festival in Las Vegas and… a festival in some unnamed location. Presumably Mason had understood that those victims would be booed if he’d said the word “Israel” to a theater full of people who had long ago lost their sense of humanity.
Mason wasn’t finished contextualizing the tragedy: “That day, and all the tragic days that have followed, have been awful for the world to bear, as we mourn the loss of all innocent lives.” All lives matter, you see, not just those of music fans. (This time, at least.)
Mason then introduced an instrumental performance by musicians of “Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab descent,” having found a way to minimize Israeli suffering that his audience would find sufficient.
To be clear, it was almost surely better than nothing. Most of the time, as Coachella demonstrated, the Nova victims get nothing—or worse than nothing.
