My sister came back from the Latitude festival the other night and tried to tell me all about it knowing full well that I am opposed to ‘Fun’ in general (being an anti-fun activist) and have a special place in my seething for festivals.

To my mind there is nothing so bastardised and depraved as the vulgar obscenity that is the modern festival… a slight exaggeration perhaps, but my point is clear enough…

‘But it’s just about having a good time,’ says my sister – who is great, for the record.

Shuddering I try and explain what I cannot; it is bastardised because it is removed from its origins in rebellion against establishment music norms and its celebration of the ‘alternative’ and the maligned ‘Other’.

And it is depraved because the ‘fun’ comes at a price that we don’t know that we are paying… or to better describe this depravity, I’ll steal Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Donald Rumsfeld theory of Knowledge… Rumsfeld is famous for his 3 points of intelligence:

1)There are the things we know we know…
2)There are the things we know we don’t know…
3) There are the things we don’t know that we don’t know…

Zizek points out that there is a missing fourth point… the things we don’t know that we know… and these things are the basis, he says, for ideology.

So, the ‘fun’ we have at a festival comes at a great price… the highest of which is a price we don’t know we pay… or rather we don’t know that we know it… all those unspoken prejudices we most definitely have…

The wealth accumulated from centuries of colonial tyranny allows us to pay for the portaloos and the plastic cups, burger vans and their generators… not to mention the mass squandering of energy to pump decibels, by the thousand, of meaningless, dull, safe noise into the universe… and for anyone to suggest that it is all for any other reason than corporate profit is to explicitly demonstrate their own ideological conditioning…

The unthinking acceptance of an experience handed out, doled out for common consumption in turn silently reinforces and consolidates the insane sociological construct that festivals are without consequence… the unknown awareness that by congregating in groups of thousands and thousands, participating in a crazy orgy of consumption, we are all good people, having fun, doing no harm…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am the most disgraceful of hypocrits… I am a musician and have played some small festivals. It’s just a bit a sad to see how we, youthful and potent, can so readily let the wool fall, slip over our eyes… no pulling needed…

Bing!x - www.bing-em-all.blogspot.com