Did Roger Waters Get Too Political At Desert Trip?

Roger Waters’ balloon at Desert Trip

Should music be politicized? Do musicians have a duty to get engaged in the current political nightmare and terrible mess we are going through? I was thinking about this after Bob Weir’s concert last night, a show that was not political at all, but some people in the crowd were talking about their experience at Desert Trip, where Roger Waters didn’t take any detour, and openly trashed Donald Trump during his set. He used a slide show of Trump caricatures and the words ‘CHARADE’, ‘JOKER’ as well as a few of his more deplorable quotes, and he also paraded an enormous inflatable pig on which you could read ‘DIVIDED WE FALL’, ‘FUCK TRUMP AND HIS WALL’ and ‘ARROGANT, LYING, RACIST, SEXIST PIG.’ He even shared his controversial and pro-Palestinian opinion: ‘I encourage the government in Israel to end the occupation.’

Several people attending Bob Weir’s concert said it was not the place to get political, they were there to have a good time and didn’t care for Waters’ views on US politics… really? Should we go to a Bob Weir concert, very good by any means, and get comfortable nursing a beer, a joint and plenty of nostalgia while avoiding any political view,… or should we go to a Roger Waters’ show and cheer to his ‘Fuck Trump’ pig balloons? Should art be political, always political?

I once interviewed a young artist who was fronting a very politically engaged band, and I told him that many of my favorite singer-songwriters were not political, to what he answered, ‘but art is always political’, ‘every time you put something of yourself in this world, you make a political statement’. This made me think.

Of course art can be more or less political, you rarely look for politics in a simple love song, but we have to consider the larger meaning of political, meaning that, as long as you transmit an opinion, shake up others’ ideas, and hopefully shock an entire crowd/epoch/era, you are making good art, political art,… following the idea that art should disturb the comfortable, according to the famous Cesar A. Cruz quote. Art can be considered political any time it does not comfortably align with the current status quo:

So were these people wrong to be shocked by Roger Waters’ display of politics at Desert Trip? Sure, there was about zero subtlety in what he presented during his show, ‘FUCK TRUMP AND HIS WALL’ was as direct as you can go, and it may have been this presentation which shocked people? But the thing is that Pink Floyd has always been political, have you ever listened to ‘Animals’, ‘The Wall’, ‘The Final Cut’? Waters is very active politically, has always been, he has been very outspoken during Bush’s reign and in these crazy times it was completely expected that Trump would become his target. His art has always been about politics, and may be we need more Roger Waters right now.