Blockout 2024 and the Star-Making Machinery

In light of the Blockout 2024 social media campaign, some thoughts on celebrity.

I follow every awful development in Gaza that is being covered by the heroic journalists on the ground there, but I pay very little attention to what they call "popular culture," and even less to those bizarre creatures known as "celebrities," so I'm only just now hearing about the Blockout 2024 social media campaign that's been going on since early May.

In case you're as out of the loop as I am, the idea is to get people to block celebrities on social media who have failed to condemn Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the "full-scale" version of which began last October.  Some apolitical celebrities have apparently lost hundreds of thousands of social media followers as a result of Blockout campaign efforts. 

One online effort that was brought to my attention last night is focused on those celebrities who supported a Ceasefire Now initiative during the first few weeks of the ongoing Israeli bombing campaign, or who posted something critical of a previous Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza in 2014 or 2021, but have been completely silent about the issue ever since -- even as the situation there gets unimaginably more dire by the hour.

Prior to hearing about this campaign, and all of those celebrities who have posted something at some point and then went dark forever afterwards -- the most popular handful of whom have collectively well over a hundred million followers on X alone -- I had myself noticed how even the few more politically-inclined celebrities I follow on social media have also had very little to say about Gaza.  For those artists whose fans look to them as icons of political dissent, one might hope for a much more robust response to a US-funded carpet-bombing and forced starvation campaign being carried out in broad daylight, covered 24/7 by Al-Jazeera and other networks.

While I am completely sympathetic with any campaign that might raise awareness among the general public that there is a US-funded, US-sponsored genocide happening right now, which the western press is misleadingly calling the "Israel-Hamas War," it's probably worth pointing out a few important things about celebrities and celebrity culture.  Especially the fact that, like the overwhelming majority of the US Congress today and for a long time before now, the overwhelming majority of those who we call celebrities are puppets.

I don't know who my audience is as I write this, or if I am saying anything that's remotely useful or new for anyone.  But at least for the "in case you didn't know" department, it is not just the political elite in the USA that are essentially appointed by corporate handlers.  Here in Oregon, progressive Susheela Jayapal's bid for a seat in the House of Representatives was defeated by a flood of money that, upon some fine journalistic investigation, turns out to have come from AIPAC donors.  You'll find other Congressional races like that one across the country.

It's not that AIPAC is picking random Israel supporters off the streets and running them for Congress.  The candidates they support are generally literate and ostensibly capable of fulfilling the duties of a bought-off politician and can do so convincingly, so many people get the impression they're acting in good faith.

Among the pop stars and Hollywood actors it's long been the same kind of arrangement.  Random people off the street also don't become celebrities -- the people who do tend to have all kinds of impressive skills that they've worked very hard at, involving things like acting, singing, and dancing.  But it has been the case for over a century in the US, with occasional exceptions to prove the rule, that people who become celebrities were prepared from the outset either to tow a political line, or to stay out of making political statements altogether, depending on the time and place in question.

Someone may be talented, rich, and famous, be they a politician, a football player, or a musician, but whether they were elected with money from AIPAC, or they're playing for the 49ers, or they're signed to one of the big three record labels, the idea that these celebrities are independent players with their own voices is overwhelmingly nonsense, propaganda -- but propaganda actively disseminated by the Congressional campaigns and the record labels alike, as the "self-made man," "rags to riches" story is an essential element of marketing most celebrities.

A pop star is as unlikely to go off-script and start advocating for causes that aren't approved by management as a senator elected with AIPAC money is to vote against military aid to Israel.  In both cases, the reasons are the same:  they're puppets, they don't have independent voices, and if they dare to exercise their voice to promote a non-approved message, there will be severe consequences.

My assumption as far as why celebrities don't go off-script very often is not that they fear the potential consequences as much as that if they had wanted to be rebels against imperialism they wouldn't have spent their lives aspiring towards and working to achieve stardom in the first place.

We needn't look much beyond Roger Waters to see why a celebrity would want to steer clear of being outspokenly critical of Israel.  Waters is now a regular target of vilification and ridicule by Israel supporters, regularly facing cancellations of events and both legal and extralegal consequences of all kinds.

Specifically because I am not a celebrity and have never been one, my own case might also be a good illustration of the challenges faced by celebrities who might once have spoken out, and then stopped.

People who have read much of what I've written in the past may already be familiar with my sordid tale, but to briefly summarize salient points in the career timeline:

• I used to get regular airplay on BBC until the programmer who played my music was questioned by the BBC Board of Governors -- for the first time in his thirty years at the corporation -- about his playing my pro-Palestine songs, and was fired soon after.  
• I was on my way to Vancouver, BC to accept an award from a Palestinian community center and I was turned away at the border and banned from entering Canada for a year.
• After doing a benefit concert for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to buy a new printing press in New Zealand, I was banned from entering New Zealand the next time I tried to tour there.
  
• For years, any time I try to do a gig anywhere, venues and fellow performers get targeted by trolls making all sorts of false statements about me.  More recently venues in the UK receive threats of legal action from lawyers if they don't cancel my appearance.
• The pro-Israel trolling in recent months has meant, in the month of April, getting an average of 1,000 comments per day on Facebook from pro-Israel trolls or bots, saying vile things.

And again, this is what happens to a pro-Palestine musician who is not even close to being a celebrity.  I don't even have a booking agent.  I can only try to imagine the scale of the bile that must have flowed in the direction of any of the actually famous people who made statements against Israel's war crimes, if a bit player like myself has been targeted to such a degree by organizations like UK Lawyers for Israel, with their legal threats and troll farms.

In conclusion, block the celebrities all you like, I hope it has some kind of positive result.  But there is a wizard behind the curtain that is putting on those musicals, just as there is a wizard behind the curtain who turns the lawyers into your elected officials.  And it is the puppeteers, rather than the puppets, who have the real power and the real influence.