Music making, concerts and sustainability

This past week, all the armchair pundits - including tone-deaf and musically untalented politicians - have given their two sen (it’s worth less than that once you add inflation and their ignorance) about the virtues of Swiftonomics.

If you are late for the train, let me summarise it for you: pop superstar Taylor Swift’s multiple mega concerts in Singapore in the past week have been lamented as a “lost opportunity” for Malaysia’s dire economics.

Let me set it straight as a well-travelled and road-weary troubadour: she would never have come here in the first place.

In their right mind, do you think her entourage and management would choose a country where music gigs get raided regularly and concert cancellations have been a hobby of authorities of late?

And do we think she will swap her fake tiara-laden shiny swimsuit aerobic outfit for a “local culture” aurat-compliant outfit to fit into “local sensibilities”?

And do you think her management sees any benefit in having to deal with the guidelines set by the Central Agency for Application for Filming and Performance (Puspal) the relatively costly permit costs that even a one-off concert of hers in Malaysia would entail?

Of course they won’t, and of course lawmakers and concert promoters in neighbouring Singapore have been paying close attention to Malaysian concert and music-related news and cultural politics (instead of bickering amongst themselves) holding back their excitement in private as we continually shoot ourselves in the foot for missing the creative industries gravy train.

Cultural sustainability

Arts and politics have always been two sides of the same coin, although the entertainment industry (and politics) distract us from the real issues that matter and you might wonder, what does the title of this article have to do with sustainability?

Sustainability is an effective tool of mass distraction, especially when it’s juxtaposed against economics.

Again, if you are late to the game, sustainability is the buzzword for the political class and corporations alike.

As someone who has to dabble in the increasingly corporatised higher education industry to get by for more than two decades (to keep my art pure and honest - I’m an underground artist), I’ve seen the exponential increase in the buzzword being bandied around while hardly any of the supposed qualities of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) - there 17 of them - benefits the workers on the ground tasked to bring birth to this novel concept by our corporate masters.

I’d like to narrow down one form of sustainability we are oftentimes blinded to - cultural sustainability.

This Saturday will be the day the music died in Malaysia: the Penang House of Music will close shop after being caught in some legal tangle over its rent in the state-owned Komtar.

Here is an archive-cum-mini museum doing the thankless work of collecting and archiving Penang’s musical and cultural heritage for the past seven years that has benefited the community but received very little actual support from those who trump sustainability: the chummy political and corporate fraternities.

I can hypothesise the indifference: there’s no political benefit that both parties could gain from.

‘The future’

The media, both online and mainstream, just went along with the hype of Swiftonomics, typical of our “can’t see the forest for the trees” mentality when it comes to cultural matters in our own backyard.

While I do genuinely admire the goals that the United Nations listed in the SDG, the problem with the corporatisation of sustainability is that it will eventually be wilted down into a mere checklist of “Things To Do” and works merely as the proverbial carrot dangling in front of us, just out of reach.

The issue goes back to this concept of “the future”: notice how children and nature often featured prominently in images related to this concept. Not Swift - unless she wears some “sustainable” aerobic outfit for her concert, naturally.

“The future” is a dangerous concept that is open to abuse. We see insurance and investment scams.

Similarly, leaving the conversation and decision-making about cultural sustainability to industry insiders alone will leave the foot soldiers and workers doing the real work on the ground without receiving accolades burnt out and disillusioned.

The sheer amount of paperwork and drudgery (computers and lighting consume a lot of electricity) of trying to make sustainability come to fruition itself is an unsustainable act: the various roadshows, talks, press junkets, PR stunts, private jets flying about, etc, surely leave a huge carbon footprint larger than the outcome of the goals could ever plug.

By the time corporations complete the SDG checklist, we’ll probably be left with another larger mess.

Fear not, then it is time to draft another campaign based on “the future”. - Mkini

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AZMYL YUNOR is an underground recording artist and academic in the field of media, film and cultural studies.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.