My year in review.
I'm inclined not to dwell on the sordid subject, but it's the end of December, when it appears that everybody is writing a Year in Review of one sort or another, and when I think of my year in review, on a personal/career level, at least, what stands out in particular are cancelations, restrictions, and deletions, both IRL and online.
It was also a year of many other things, to be sure.
It was a full year of watching a genocide in real time, committed by Israelis and livestreamed by their Palestinian targets.
It was another year of spending most of my time at home, taking children to school, hanging out at the park with them afterwards, and all sorts of lovely domestic stuff, in between consuming news of the apocalypse and writing and recording songs and podcasts about it.
It was a year that involved a bunch of different tours in different parts of the world, as has long been a common feature of life for me -- Kamala and I did a little bit of touring in the US and Canada, and a lot more touring in Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia.
It was also another year when certain people try to get my gigs canceled, and this is unfortunately not new. What has changed markedly over the past year, however, are the scale of these efforts, and how broadly they've expanded.
In what will probably and appropriately be the last song I write this year, "Canceled," I go through a laundry list of obstacles that have been thrown in my way in 2024.
But for whoever's interested in a longer version of the song, I'll render here a little exploration of some of the highlights of the year from the vantage point of my work, and what may seem like the surprisingly intense efforts to suppress it, given my very limited reach.
At the beginning of 2024, in January, Chet Gardiner and I put out our first collaborative album of the year, this one almost entirely documenting the Gaza genocide of latter 2023, called Notes from a Holocaust. It would remain up on Spotify (the world's most popular streaming platform) until being removed, with no notification or explanation, sometime in August.
In February of 2024 Kamala and I spent the first half of the month working on a recording project with my daughter, Leila, and a bunch of other musicians from around the world in France. The second half of February Kamala, Leila and I spent traveling and doing gigs in England.
While we were still in France I heard about the successful cancelation of one of the London gigs, by an anonymous person who contacted the owner of the venue and made veiled threats about what might happen to them if they didn't cancel the gig, because I'm evidently a transphobe, and so if the venue had me play there, maybe the trans community would boycott them, or worse.
But it was once we were in England that the real shitstorm began. In late February it became clear that a group called UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust were writing emails to owners and managers of venues we were scheduled to play at, and threatening them with legal action if they didn't cancel these gigs with this artist who was fomenting racial hatred against Jews (me).
One of the venues canceled. The organizer of that gig, in Portsmouth, found another venue and re-promoted the gig at the new venue, with great difficulty.
At the same time in late February as I heard about the email to one of the venues to get them to cancel the gig, my Facebook account began to get flooded with pro-Israel insults against me and anyone who associated with me, at a rate of 27,000 comments per month.
I know the number because Facebook told me, in an automated end-of-the-month notification to congratulate me for the increased engagement on my otherwise moribund account.
In April my second album of 2024, Bearing Witness, came out on Spotify and elsewhere. It didn't generate as much engagement on Spotify as Notes from a Holocaust had, but there was a bump in listeners for a while after it came out.
With this album, as with every other one I'd put out in 2024, there would be mysterious gaps, where some songs indicated they had been streamed thousands of times, and other songs not at all. None of my previous albums look like that.
With thousands of new fans on platforms like Spotify actively listening to and sharing these new albums, from prior experience with similar situations, it was not at all surprising that I began to hear from people who were involved with the campus occupations that were starting up all over the place.
On the one occasion I was invited to sing at a campus occupation in the US, the invitation was rescinded, while I was heading towards the campus, on the basis of me being a fascist-platforming antisemite, somehow, even after writing all these songs that would seem to indicate someone who viscerally and obviously opposes fascism and shows no signs of Jew-hating.
Every other campus engagement I'd have in the US in 2024 would have an anemic attendance, with other students having been forewarned that I am some kind of toxic material that needed to be avoided entirely.
The consistent thing that's going on in all these cases is whenever my name is being mentioned in the context of promoting an event I'm singing at, the trolls or bots or agents or whoever who are receiving notifications every time my name is mentioned online then jump into the conversation and make sure everyone is informed about what a despicable person I actually am.
In July, a tour of Australia, and good news -- Julian Assange was being released from prison and was heading home.
Unlike most gigs in the USA, in Australia gigs were well-attended, and unlike in the USA, they welcomed music at the protests, and we sang at them everywhere we went.
But several venerable Australian institutions of the left that had long been important places for performers like me to play at were under attack by Zionists representing themselves as "the Jewish community" in places like Ballarat, with these very familiar forms of cancelation-campaigning and character assassination clearly at play.
During our travels in Australia we listened to the audiobook rendition of Invisible Rulers by Renee DiResta, which was a very useful low-down on the state of affairs with regards to what DiResta calls the collision of the propaganda machine with the rumor mill.
Even people educated on the ways of troll farms, however, are liable to be adversely impacted by them, in so many ways. And the many who don't really have any idea what level of automated sophistication we're up against are left truly in the dark.
Mid-July the next album came out, I Heard a Rumor, which has also been restricted in terms of which songs indicate that they have been streamed at all, unlike any recordings previous to 2024.
In August Kamala and I were in Chicago for the DNC protests. None of them had live music that had anything to do with the issues at hand, and none of the protest organizers ever responded to either of us when asked if they wanted music at the protests. Music doesn't happen at protests in the USA anymore, basically, unless it's a Trump rally.
Then came word at the end of August that Sarah Wilkinson had been brutally arrested in England, on the basis of having violated Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000. It seems to have been sometime around then that Notes from a Holocaust was disappeared from Spotify, possibly for violating the same law.
In September I discovered that the platform I had been using for years to send text messages to multiple recipients, Twilio, was no longer working. I got in touch with them, and this began a months-long odyssey of being told there was one more thing I needed to do in order to be officially re-registered for using the service, but no matter which "final" step I completed, there was always another one. To date, I still can't use the service.
By September it also became inescapably obvious that it wasn't just that Facebook was suppressing political content, but my Facebook account was seriously restricted. If you look for the account status it won't say it's restricted, but it behaves the same as other accounts that are restricted, in very important ways. I am unable to use the Invite feature to invite people to Facebook Events, putting a serious damper on the daily usefulness of this still-very-major platform to help promote my gigs.
In late September, a venue I've played at a dozen times over the past two decades or so in Victoria, BC canceled a scheduled concert there last-minute on completely ridiculous grounds. The Palestine connection was obvious, though this cancelation may or may not have been related to the campaigning against me in particular.
As with Portsmouth, England the previous February, organizers in Victoria, with great personal effort, found an alternative venue and managed to get the word out to folks about the venue change.
In October the fourth studio album of 2024 came out, Jabaliya, which has faced the same restrictions on Spotify as the other two that weren't removed altogether.
The first week of November was originally going to involve a bunch of gigs in Belgium, but these were reduced to one gig, basically, largely because of a cancelation campaign going on against the person who was going to be the organizer of the tour.
Gigs we then had in Scandinavia went OK, but many had smaller crowds than they normally would have. There are always many possible explanations for this phenomenon, but I'm sure restrictions to my Facebook account played a role, and I'm pretty sure the cancelation campaigning around my name online plays a role as well, even there.
One indication of that phenomenon at work in Scandinavia was the unexpected cancelation of our gig in Gothenburg. It did end up happening, in a different venue -- the Gaza encampment at the university, the last in Europe, which was ended by the authorities there a week later.
Originally, however, it was to happen at the Syndicalist Forum. Then the Syndicalist Forum was informed by the usual trolls -- about whom they were warned in advance -- that I'm a bad guy. Unusually for Scandinavian leftists, they believed this nonsense, and then canceled the gig, last-minute, with no offer to compensate me for my losses. An altogether un-Scandinavian occurrence, and I suspect there's an American involved, but whatever, a gig cancelation resulting from online trolling happened in Scandinavia, too, for the first time, in November, 2024.
While we were traveling through Scandinavia we also listened to an audiobook. This time Betty Medsger's book, The Burglary, about the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, and their raid on the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971 that revealed Cointelpro to the world.
As with Invisible Rulers, The Burglary represented some useful hours spent listening and talking and thinking about the sorts of infiltration, dirty tricks, and disinformation the FBI has been engaged in on such a massive scale, mainly targeting the American left, since its inception as a secret police agency.
Both books provoked a lot of thought and discussion about how I'm being targeted by what appear to be the same sorts of troll farms DiResta describes, and the same sorts of underhanded tactics aimed at character assassination long practiced by the FBI that Medsger illuminated.
At the beginning of December I learned that the QR codes I had used for printing lots of stickers related to Gaza no longer functioned. And contrary to what the QR code corporation claimed on their website, even with a paid account, I was told the codes could not be resuscitated.
At the beginning of December I also received my personalized version of #SpotifyWrapped, like all the other artists and listeners on the platform do. In all the detailed accounting of how many times different albums were streamed in 2024, who listened to them, how often they shared them, etc., Notes from a Holocaust had been disappeared from existence, not even registering in the end-of-the-year statistics, as if it had never been there, despite having been the album that was most-listened-to of the ones that came out in 2024.
Spotify has a Beta feature where you can pick a particular track for them to insert into people's song recommendations more often. You make even less money on that one, but it gets heard more. It's Payola, as they once would have called it, but I somehow got signed up for this program, and there seems to be no way to get off of it once you're in it. So I pick a song or two for extra play every month, and every month for most of 2024 it was "Famine and Disease," about the UN's prediction that this was where Gaza was heading if things went as badly as they were going in November, 2023.
Things went that badly, as many predicted they would, and now the UN is just on the cusp of declaring the north of Gaza to be in an actual state of famine.
The studio recording of "Famine and Disease" that many people heard on Spotify in 2024, however, no longer exists. Just the famine itself.
Happy New Year to you, too!
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