Music Against the Machine (a Post–Music Wins Post)

Is this what they say the future feels like?
Or are we just 20 thousand people standing on a property?
["Sorted for E's and Wizz", Pulp]

This is a beautiful day. It is a new day. We are together, we are unified and on one accord. Because together we got power –apart we got pow-wow. Today on this program you will hear gospel and rhythm and blues, and jazz. All those are just labels. We know that music is music. That's the voice that opens Primal Scream's "Come Together" (Screamadelica, 1991). This Sunday was a beautiful, new day, and we gathered for the national pastime known as going to festivals –this time, Music Wins. Primal Scream played, Massive Attack played (with Horace Andy and Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins), Yo La Tengo played, and a set of Argentine bands resonated hard: Winona Riders, Camionero, Fonso y Las Paritarias. Festival did what festivals do.

Argentina has countless festival moments etched into myth. Of the canonical ones, my favorite is the Adrián Dárgelos + Intoxicados / Pity Álvarez + Babasonicos relay at Pepsi Music 2006 –personally, an altar-stage consecration of my under-20 cultural wiring. We all have whimsical, personal bits that never make it into coverage. They're endless –so I’ll just cite four we've covered at 421 (mainly so you can click through, even when those pieces are in spanish): Knotfest, Creamfields, Quilmes Rock, Cosquín Rock. Today's piece is neither review nor recap –I'm not sure what it is.

I felt it that Babasonicos/Intoxicados night, and I felt it at Music Wins: certain artists, at certain festivals, amplify our tribe. People who share your tastes often share your ideas –the ones who shelter your oddities and mutating listening pleasures. Not always, but sometimes, artists can channel the spontaneous-march energy of a crowd. Still, festivals are balm, not assemblies –and X is full of folks who don't know where Primal Scream or Massive Attack stop the pendulum swinging. Note it: with real artists, you get the full combo.

The public stage has the receipts. Bobby Gillespie is Scottish, pro-independence, son of socialists; he talks class politics and calls out the Palestinian genocide as part of a technofascist project. At Mandarine Park –like elsewhere on tour– he waved a Palestinian flag and spoke his piece. Then Massive Attack delivered a set of surgical impact, with roots-reggae legend Horace Andy and dream-pop pioneer Liz Fraser. Robert "3D" Del Naja wore a Viva Palestina armband; the visuals circled cyber-surveillance, psy-ops, and power-core conspiracies. "So post-Black Mirror, it’s passé", some said. To me, that's core Massive Attack.

From the damp living-room festipunk with brown bottles on the floor to the poshest poser event, festivals –rock or otherwise– are a key feedline for under-40s across Buenos Aires City and Province. Like streaming platforms, consoles, homegrow, gender fluidity, empanada kiosks, monotributo, studio apartments, or sugar-free, post-Kirchnerist Peronism, festivals are part of a cultural –and biological– support grid.

Music is animal and elemental –evolving with us, technologies, and our matter-of-fact discoveries. New tech + new drugs: the launchpad of constant shifts in art, industry, and the music market. Lately I've been thinking about music in the abstract –we just shipped a music-themed 421 issue; I’ve been diving into the world of drums, played with my band last week, and felt music's rescue from boredom as a fiercely honest, necessary introspection.

We're at the edge of tomorrow. The machine now surveils, manipulates, and markets at scales that dwarf our shrinking agency and discernment. With people overworked, precarized, numbed, overmedicated, cruel or depressed –late to everything, submitting everything late– we enter the fight with the softest mettle on record (glass generation, cancel culture, doomscrolling, et al.). Across from us is the juiced-up engine, vacuuming our data and monetizing our every click.

Call me a fool, but I still find hope in a chorus sung from the middle of the pack –hope that's personal, class-based, species-wide. Hope in our little redoubts of strangeness, delirium, beauty, and joy: the bands that move us, thrill us, and turn up the heat.